The worst ever flaw in Android was discovered in April but only publicly announced a couple of days ago. You can read about the flaw here... http://www.theguardian.com/technolo...right-android-vulnerability-heartbleed-mobile And you can read about how to protect yourself here... https://www.twilio.com/blog/2015/07/how-to-protect-your-android-device-from-stagefright-exploit.html If you use a dual SIM, make sure you disable auto-retrieval of MMS on both SIM cards on ALL text messaging apps on your device!!
Yep that is one hell of a security flaw read about it yesterday. And people slag Microsoft, security is hard to achieve on any device and popularity of the platform only increases the chances that someone will exploit a flaw. I only have one Android device, a tablet which has no 3G or 4G connection, I just tether the tablet to my Windows phone when I want to use the net.
I am surprised that Google defaults to downloading MMS in its SMS/MMS apps (Google Hangouts and the Android default messaging app) if there was ever a possibility of a security risk. For email, the Gmail web interface does not automatically open attachments and Google gives you a warning if an attachment likely contains a virus or malicious link. For images embedded in an email itself, Google used to default to not download the images but, less than 2 years ago, the default changed to always downloading images, but that was with good reason - Google presented those images via its own servers and not via the senders servers. That enables Google to filter out privacy and security risks in emails at least. But MMS is not be seen by Google severs, so all the more reason why the Google messaging apps should not automatically download MMS. Personally, I don't use MMS so it would be better for me to have an SMS app that did not incorporate MMS at all or, at least, allowed MMS to be disabled entirely. I realise that could add a few issues; for example, on some devices if you send an SMS over 160 characters long or it contains emoticons, it may get sent as an MMS instead.
