Sundar Pichai, Google's senior vice president in charge of Android and Chrome, speaks during a special event at Dogpatch Studios. (Photo : Getty Images/Justin Sullivan)
Google has released their monthly security update for devices running the Nexus Android on April 4 and it has crushed critical Android bugs. For this month, the update fixed eight critical issues that Android had for a while now, including the libstagefright library.
As part of the company's Android Security Bulletin Monthly Release process, they released a new security update through over-the-air update, read the new bulletin on Android's official site. Google's partners were warned earlier of these problems in its latest bulletin. The Android Open Source Project will have the source code patches in the next two days and the bulletin will be changed with the AOSP links when they are available for download.
With this new update, exploitation for many issues on the Android will be more difficult. The security team of Android now actively monitors the system for abuse with Verify Apps and SafetyNet. Verify Apps protect users and warn them about the known rooting apps that usually come from installing apps outside of Google Play, and it will attempt to identify and block installation of known malicious apps.
One of the major issues that this update has fixed was a method that allowed remote code execution on an affected device. It could have been done through email, web browsing, and MMS when processing the media files.
There are 30 known vulnerabilities that have been fixed with this month's update in totality. All of these issues that were fixed with this new update were first reported from late 2015 to February 2016.
It is expected that devices that use Nexus will get an update soon to fix all issues and vulnerabilities. There is also a big chance that most of these problems will finally be fixed due to other manufacturers following Google's idea of releasing monthly updates to devices powered by Nexus.
Meanwhile, according to Google Developer's official site, it has gotten the Nexus firmware images if users want to restore their Nexus device's original factory firmware in case they want a clean firmware. If users have used the AOSP, they will find the files useful for different purposes like flashing custom builds on their own device.
Check out the Nexus 5X introduction video below:
