Tag: Android Security

Good news this morning for those of you who have a Samsung Galaxy S6 or S6 Edge on T-Mobile.  The carrier is now rolling out the July Android Security Update to these devices and it should be hitting yours sometime this week.  The updates are small, just over 50MB for each of the devices, and mostly focus on brining the July 2017 update to the devices.  There are a few minor fixes and improvements too but the security patch is the big news.

For those with a Galaxy S6, you are looking for version G920TUVS5FQG1 while the S6 Edge will be getting version G925TUVS5FQG1.  Both of these devices received the Android Nougat 7.0 update from the carrier last month.

As expected, Google has released the February Android Security Bulletin today, highlighting the security vulnerabilities and fixes addressed since last month.  The company has also released the OTA updates for the February builds which means that owners of compatible Nexus and Pixel devices will get the update shortly.

Like last month, the February update consists of two distinct patches.  The first patch, dated February 1, deals with general vulnerabilities in Android Nougat while the second patch, dated February 5, is more specific to Nexus and Pixel devices.  Both patches have security fixes but the second patch deals with security patches with specific device drivers.  In all there are 35 fixes, 8 of which are considered critical and 18 are considered high priority.  You can read about all of them in the Bulletin release notes.

The September 2016 Android security patches have been released for both Android Marshmallow and Nougat today.  This month there are three different patches available, an increase from the two that we have seen over the past few months.  Google has been working to spur on manufactures to get the security updates out quicker and by further subdividing the patches, it is further eliminating reasons on why they aren’t released.

According to the Security Bulletin released by the Android team, the patch 2016-09-01 will primarily deal with remote code execution and elevation of privileges within the Android platform.  This patch contains two critical updates and five high priority updates.