Researchers have developed Metaphor, a “fast, reliable, and stealthy” exploit for the Stagefright vulnerability that can affect millions of Android devices. Whether or not the attack becomes widely successful will depend on how seriously carriers and manufacturers react to this threat.
Stagefright refers to the group of security issues in Android library libstagefright that was found last year by researchers at mobile security company Zimperium. Attackers could potentially remotely execute code on the vulnerable device through a malicious email message, website, or even an MMS message.
Google promptly patched the flaws in the library, which parses video and other media files, as well as the Mediaserver component. The company has also fixed related bugs in both libstagefright and Mediaserver since then as part of the monthly security update process.
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