Thread: security issue discovered in latest HTC Android devices

A major security vulnerability has been discovered in recent HTC Android phones that would make the recent location tracking issue in iOS seem trivial in comparison.


Discovered by the people at Android Police along with Trevor Eckhart, this issue plagues HTC's latest Android phones such as the EVO 3D, EVO 4G, Sensation and Thunderbolt.

What is happening here is that these HTC phones are logging user data such as email addresses, SMS data, location, phone numbers, system logs, etc. thanks to a suite of logging tools installed by HTC in the latest updates to these devices. But while simply collecting the data may not be bad enough, the devices unfortunately make this data accessible to any application that can connect to the Internet.


This would allow someone to write an application that would take advantage of this vulnerability, misuse that data and who knows, they may already be doing that. Android Police also believe that there is enough information in there to clone your device.


There's a lot more to this than what we have discussed too and we would urge you to visit the source link to get the complete lowdown. It must be said that this is deeply troubling and the full blame falls on HTC. After failing to initially respond to Trevor's attempts to contact HTC, the company has now finally responded on the matter and assured that they are working on it, so hopefully a fix will be issued soon.


Do note that this issue is only apparent on the latest HTC devices running the latest firmware. If you have an older device or a newer rooted device running a custom ROM then you have no reason to worry about it.