Apple fans, Android world scramble to patch Broadcom’s nasty drive-by Wi-Fi security hole – The Register (Apr 6, 2017)

There are two interesting things here, both worth discussing briefly. Firstly, Broadcom, which provides chips for many popular smartphones including the iPhone, has a vulnerability in its WiFi element which can be hacked, allowing a way into the device. Apple issued a patch this week to deal with the issue, and Android vendors will be working to close the vulnerability too, though there’s no specific timeframe yet, highlighting yet another challenge with Android’s fragmented ecosystem. The second thing that’s interesting here is that the vulnerability was discovered by Google’s Project Zero team, which is set up to discover and fix vulnerabilities like this, and has been doing great work lately doing just that, including on non-Google devices like the iPhone. Vulnerabilities like this are always worrying, and it’s great to have Google out there with what seems like a strong team detecting these and notifying vulnerable vendors so they can patch the issues.

via The Register


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