After the fall of the infamous Samsung Galaxy S7, Apple's iPhone 7 took Samsung Galaxy 7's crown as the world's finest phone of 2016. A few weeks later, Google Pixel emerged and was believed to rival Apple's iPhone 7, but fell short after its release. Since then, Google Pixel has been receiving non-stop bad reviews and here is the latest:
Google Pixel Hacked In Less Than 60 Seconds At PwnFest 2106
According to a written article at BGR, the annual PwnFest was held in Seoul. This is a bug pwning "festival" for better security organized by PC with the help of sponsors, vendors, and judges. Don't worry, they don't aim to inspire people to be criminals and hack tech companies.
In the PwnFest hacking competition, a group of Chinese White-Hat hackers from Qihoo 360 presented the ability to achieve RCE (remote code execution) to gain control of the Google Pixel smartphone. To acquire the RCE, the group demonstrated a POC (proof of concept) that uses a zero-day vulnerability. They showed how easy it was for them to install malicious codes on Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones. In doing so, the team was able to successfully launch the Play Store app before opening a webpage on Google Chrome that read "Pwned By 360 Alpha Team," and won a cash of $120,000.
There Is More To It
Despite how shocking it may seem (given that it has bad reviews), this is not the first time that the Google Pixel was hacked in a live event. During the Mobile Pwn2Own event in Japan, a group from Tencent, the Keen Team, demonstrated on how to hack the Google Pixel and gain the smartphone's data. Making the people realize how vulnerable the Google Pixel and Google Pixel XL smartphones are.
What Google plans to do
Upon hearing this information, it is said that Google has already been informed and is planning to send a patch update for the Google Pixel and Google Pixel XL smartphones. However, users of the Pixel phones are already growing impatient of Google's slow response. Aside from this "easily hacked" issue, there are already a number of issues that the Google Pixel and Google Pixel XL smartphones has and has not yet been "fixed" by Google. Tech enthusiasts are already saying that Google's patch to fix the Pixel phone issues will be too late. And by that time, the Pixel phones will be a thing of that past and people will buy the upcoming smartphones instead.
If you want to know more of the issues about the Google Pixel phones, here are some of the many issues that smartphone has to offer according to QZ.
