{"id":46130,"date":"2012-03-20T09:48:47","date_gmt":"2012-03-20T07:48:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=46130"},"modified":"2012-03-20T09:50:11","modified_gmt":"2012-03-20T07:50:11","slug":"android-ads-expose-users-to-security-holes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/technology\/46130-android-ads-expose-users-to-security-holes.html","title":{"rendered":"Android ads expose users to security holes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Applications on <a title=\"Android Mobile Oerating System\" href=\"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/vb\/showthread.php\/221979-Google-Android\">Android<\/a> that make use of advertising to generate revenue may open users up to privacy and security loopholes, says North Carolina State University researchers.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers found that many of the libraries, used in free Android applications to display in-application advertisements, can be used to bypass Android security.<\/p>\n<p>In some cases these ad libraries &#8220;go a step further by making use of an unsafe mechanism to directly fetch and run code from the Internet, which immediately leads to serious security risks,&#8221; wrote the researchers.<\/p>\n<p>The team examined 100,000 applications on <a title=\"Google\" href=\"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/vb\/showthread.php\/314567-Google\">Google<\/a> Play (formerly the Android Market), and found that nearly half of them had libraries that track a user&#8217;s GPS location.<\/p>\n<p>One in 23 allowed the location data to be passed back to the advertiser.<\/p>\n<p>In some cases, the libraries could access a user&#8217;s call logs, phone numbers, and a list of other apps on the device.<\/p>\n<p>Read the full story at: <a title=\"Ars Technica News site\" href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/business\/news\/2012\/03\/researchers-find-privacy-and-security-holes-in-android-apps-with-ads.ars\" target=\"_blank\">Ars Technica<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Android applications that use ads may expose users to security threats<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":42213,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[397,10026],"class_list":["post-46130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","tag-android","tag-google-google-play"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46130"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46130"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46132,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46130\/revisions\/46132"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}