MediaTek, the Taiwanese semiconductor and chipset maker, has found itself in some rather hot water. As it turns out, a critical security exploit was discovered within a rootkit that would effectively leave many MediaTek SoC-powered device vulnerable to exploitation.
The discovery was made by XDA developer, diplomatic, who was actually looking for an easy way to root Amazon Fire HD tablets. Once he found his avenue, things simply just took off from there. To cut a very long story short, the exploit soon deemed to be a pretty severe threat to MediaTek-powered Android device. It forced Google’s hand, prompting the search engine’s software engineers to work with XDA in order to fix the problem.
At the time of writing, XDA says that the exploits affect almost every single 64-bit MediaTek processor unless it’s been patched. To that end, several brands that use the brand’s chipsets – this includes Samsung, Vivo, Huawei, HONOR, and OPPO, to name a few – have already patched their devices.
It should be noted that MediaTek-powered phones running Android 10 or later are not affected. While devices from said brands running Android 8.0 Oreo or later have already been patched. As for the affected Amazon Fire HD tablets, the tablets can be patched, provided they’ve been updated with a specific firmware version.
(Source: XDA via Android Central)
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