More than 5,300 million devices with Bluetooth could be affected by malware recently discovered by a security company. We know it thanks to the work of a team of researchers from Armis Labs, and the reality is that it is quite worrisome.
Basically, they say that virtually all devices with Bluetooth connectivity are at risk : smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, laptops, wearables, speakers, cars, etc.
This gives us a real dimension of this problem. They have baptized this new attack as BlueBorne , and what is really dangerous is that it is capable of expanding without the victims doing something or realizing it.
Once they have managed to infect it, attackers can access all our data and networks (including those that are secure), spreading this malware to other devices that are nearby.
In most cases, the malware needs us to click on a link or download some type of file to infect the device. What is really worrying about BlueBorne is that all they need is for the Bluetooth connection to be activated.
To make matters worse, researchers have also found eight zero-day vulnerabilities, of which four have been classified as critical. These vulnerabilities affect devices that use different operating systems , including Microsoft, Google or Apple.
These three companies have released patches to protect themselves from this vulnerability. In the case of Apple, the company has confirmed that it does not affect devices with iOS 10 or higher. Anyway, Armis has found that it does affect all devices with iOS 9.3.5 or lower versions .
In the case of Android , Google has declared that in August they launched an update to solve this problem, although it is up to the operators that this patch has reached the devices. That means that all Pixels are safe.
Of the 2 billion devices using Android, at least 180 million do not yet have the patch , according to data from Armis. As we see, the really worrying thing is that there are so many affected devices that there could be a huge percentage of them that are still at risk.
We could say that the safest thing is to disable Bluetooth connectivity, although it is not something we can do in all scenarios.