Researchers uncover unknown Android flaws used to hack into a student’s phone

Amnesty International says Google has previously fixed the unknown defects on Android that allows authorities to unlock the phone using forensic equipment.

Friday, Amnesty International has released a report A chain of three Zero-day weakness The phone-unlocking company developed by the cellbite, which its researchers found a student in Serbia after the hack investigation of the protest phone. According to the report, the defects were found in the Core Linux USB kernel, which means “weakness is not limited to a particular device or seller and can have more than one billion Android devices,” the report says.

The zero-day is a bug in products that are unknown to software or hardware manufacturers when found. Zero-days allow criminal and government hackers to enter the system in a way that is more effective because there is no patch that still fixs them.

In this case, Amnesty said that it was found in one of the errors in the middle of the first 20. Then, last year, after investigating the hack of a Serbian student worker, the company shared its search with the Anti-Hacking Unit Analysis group of Google, which the company managed to detect and resolve three separate defects.

During the investigation of the activist’s phone, Amnesty researchers found the USB absorption, which allowed the Serbian authorities to unlock the employee’s phone using celebrity equipment.

Celebite spokesperson Victor Cooper refers to the comment A statement The company that was published earlier this week.

In December, Amnesty has reported that it has received two cases Where the Serbian authorities used the cellbrite forensic equipment to unlock the phone of a staff and a journalist, and later installed an Android spyware known as the NovCP. At the beginning of this week, Sellebotte declared That it prevented his Serbian customer from using his technology after allegations of misuse of general amnesty.

“After reviewing the allegations published by the Amnesty International Report of December 2021, Celebrity took appropriate steps to investigate every claim in accordance with our morality and integrity policies. We seem to be appropriate to stop the use of our products by relevant customers at this time, “Cellbete wrote in his statement.

In the new report Amnesty says that it was contacted in January to analyze the youth employee’s device arrested by the Serbian Protection Information Agency (Protection and informative agency Or BIA) by the end of last year.

“The situation of his arrest and the behavior of the BIA officers, the modus operandi used against the protesters, match the view with the openings and we enrolled in our report in December. In a forensic investigation of the device operated in January, the student worker’s phone confirmed the use of cellbite on the phone, “Amnesty wrote.

In other cases, the authorities used a celebrite device according to Amnesty “without his knowledge or consent, and beyond legally approved investigation” by the Activist’s Samsung.

Amnesty writes, “The apparent use of celebrite software against people to exercise freedom and peaceful assembly rights can never be a valid goal,” Amnesty wrote, “and therefore violating human rights law.”

Senior researcher of Citizens Lab Bill Markakak, a digital right focus that investigates spyware, Wrote x These workers, journalists and members of the civil society “may consider switching on the iPhone (protests, boundaries, etc.) by the authorities who may have seized their phones (protests, borders, etc.), because of this weakness.”

Referring to celebrite equipment, Doncha, head of the Amnesty Protection Lab, told Serbil TechCrunch that “the far -reaching availability of these national equipment feared me that we simply tease the surface of the damage from these products.”

Google did not immediately respond to any request for the comment.