Check Point is a security farm that has recently unveiled the alarming fact that over 900 million smartphones around the world are susceptible to hacker attacks due to what is known as the QuadRooter vulnerability. If you are wondering what is QuadRooter, it is actually a short name for four vulnerabilities that are currently plaguing Android handsets that have Qualcomm chipsets inside. Through exploitation of the susceptibilities, hackers can gain root access to these devices, if the user is tricked into installing a malware onto his/her phone that does not require any apparently visible permissions to do the harm.

On reporting this issue to Qualcomm in April, 2016, the company acknowledged the high risk threat and has since developed and provided the necessary software patches to the smartphone manufacturers. The potentially affected devices include the biggest brands and their flagships in the market, like the Samsung Galaxy S7, S7 Edge, Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, Nexus 6, HTC 10, OnePlus 3, LG G5, Lenovo Moto X 2016 and BlackBerry DTEK50. All handsets that have the August security patches from Google installed on them are protected against three of the susceptibilities, but the fourth one is still to be addressed in the upcoming September patch. Check if your device is a part of the 900 million club by downloading and running the QuadRooter Scanner application from the Play Store.

Saikat Kar (tech-enthusiast)

Few days ago, Microsoft released a patch for a critical remote code execution vulnerability, CVE-2015-1635 (MS15-034). Now, it has been spotted being exploited in the wild by researchers at the SANS Institute.

"Denial of Service (DoS) exploits are widely available to exploit CVE-2015-1635, a vulnerability in HTTP.sys, affecting Internet Information Server (IIS)," noted Johannes Ullrich, Chief Technology Officer of the SANS Internet Storm Center. The vulnerability affects Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, Windows 8.1, and Windows Server 2012 R2.

According to UK research firm Netcraft, over 70 million websites hosted on around 900,000 servers could be vulnerable. "Due to the ease with which this vulnerability can be exploited, we recommend that you expedite patching this vulnerability" - Ullrich said.

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