Dangerous Android phone 0-day bugs revealed – patch or work around them now!
Google has just revealed a fourfecta of critical zero-day bugs affecting a wide range of Android phones, including some of its own Pixel models.
These bugs are a bit different from your usual Android vulnerabilities, which typically affect the Android operating system (which is Linux-based) or the applications that come along with it, such as Google Play, Messages or the Chrome browser.
The four bugs we’re talking about here are known as baseband vulnerabilities, meaning that they exist in the special mobile phone networking firmware that runs on the phone’s so-called baseband chip.
Strictly speaking, baseband is a term used to describe the primary, or lowest-frequency parts of an individual radio signal, in contrast to a broadband signal, which (very loosely) consists of multiple baseband signals adjusted into numerous adjacent frequency ranges and transmitted at the same time in order to increase data rates, reduce interference, share frequency spectrum more widely, complicate surveillance, or all of the above. The word baseband is also used metaphorically to describe the hardware chip and the associated firmware that is used to handle the actual sending and receving of radio signals in devices that can communicate wirelessly. (Somewhat confusingly, the word baseband typically refers to the subsystem in a phone that handles conecting to the mobile telephone network, but not to the chips and software that handle Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connections.)
They essentially run a miniature operating system of their own, on a processor of their own, and work alongside your device’s main operating system to provide mobile network connectivity for making and answering calls, sending and receiving data, roaming on the network, and so on.
