Android phones—are you really smart….

      

Thinking to buy an android phones just because you get mesmerized by the fact that how your colleague, who is using an android phone to handle his daily life aesthetically using more than ample number of applications available in Developer store (read Google play store) or just because of that you are an advocate of sharing knowledge to free world and thus choosing android over I-phone and windows phone.

Well whatever are the reasons, we are not here to discuss the pros and cons of different kind of operating systems based phone. I just want to share one of my various thoughts coming from my confused mind which just cropped up in mind that an operating system which is open for all of us; if it can develop drastically in a positive way the very chance of some of it development coming by the side of negative thinkers too. 

And as I am also a proud owner of android phone, I searched a little bit over the internet and I found out this little disturbing tagline – USSD code which can erase your android- for android phone users. Literally when I read that article, I seriously thought “whoa!! I couldn’t ever see that thing coming”. So what is this thing? How does it work?

Well let me first tell you about USSD codes. Unstructured Supplementary Service Data i.e. USSD are codes made of numeric and special symbols which sometimes you run on your cell phone to avail some supplementary services like knowing your balance or knowing some info about your value added services like caller tune.  So generally YOU run these code on your cell phones nevertheless what if some hacker will run some special USSD codes through the browser of your android cell phone which can end in deleting all your data or cause call diversion or simply lock your sim or what else and trust me you will never find out how did just this happens.

So either check that whether your android phone is vulnerable to this threat by simply opening this link through your mobile browser www.isk.kth.se/~rbbo/testussd.html ; its test page simply checks that whether your android dialer process USSD codes or not and if it does it will show your phone IMEI number and thus confirming your phone vulnerability of your phone to attack or you can just install a app which is free ( the best feature of android phone) NoTelURL which will warn and ask you every-time your permission to execute it .  

Well quite a useful feature for a hacker and quite a disturbing for android users. Better it will be to have a backup of your smart phone always handy. Anyway now after whenever you start boasting about your android phone that how smart it is , just think for a while “ is it really smart” ……