On Wednesday (5 August 2015), the lead engineer of Android security at Google, Adrian Ludwig, addressed the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas telling the assembled groups of hackers, researchers and journalists that in the next few days, his employer – along with hundreds of manufacturers and high-profile partners including Samsung, HTC, LG and Sony – would be pushing out a security patch that Ludwig described as “the single largest software update the world has ever seen“.
Ludwig said it was incredible that hundreds of millions of devices would be updated within a few days. He added that the events of the last few weeks had forced Google to move faster to fix problems. Most people present instinctively linked the announcement to the Stagefright bug, which was revealed just last week. The bug could allow any hacker to take remote control of an Android smartphone simply by knowing the phone number and sending the handset in question a video multimedia message. However, it appears that there may have been an even more pressing reason for Google to push out this security update.
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