BlackBerry may not be doing well in the smartphone market, but it has moved faster than the rest of the Android OEMs (and its rivals) on QuadRooter. The Canadian firm, which announced a patch for both the DTEK50 and PRIV, says that if customers run the latest system update, they will be protected against all four of the QuadRooter vulnerabilities.
Patch for all QuadRooter vulnerabilities
In its announcement, the Waterloo-based firm noted that “three out of the four” vulnerabilities were already taken care of for the PRIV with the Marshmallow patch issued this month.
“I’m happy to announce that a patch for all of the QuadRooter vulnerabilities is now available for the PRIV and DTEK50 users,” said Alex Manea, Director of BlackBerry Security, in a blog post.
QuadRooter is actually a vulnerability that ‘droids inherited from drivers for Qualcomm chips, which are installed at the manufacturer. Security company Check Point revealed QuadRooter on the last day of DEF CON. QuadRooter is a set of four new high-severity security vulnerabilities that affect around 900 million mobile devices with Qualcomm processors.
To install the patch, just head to Settings. Then click “About phone,” and then “System updates” on your BlackBerry device.
“We’re very proud to support Google’s push for rapid security updates by becoming the first major OEM to patch all of the QuadRooter issues across our entire device portfolio,” BlackBerry said.
BlackBerry secures against issues not even discovered yet
In its blog post, the Waterloo-based company said they are not aware of any exploits for this vulnerability in the wild, and they do not think any of their consumers are currently at risk from this issue. The Canadian firm added that this is an amazing example of how their Android platform hardening proactively secures against issues that have not even been discovered yet.
In the post, the smartphone maker wrote that they made a public commitment when they launched BlackBerry Powered by Android to provide monthly security updates and “hotfix” patches for the issues. So far, they have lived up to it.
With the DTEK50 and Priv, a user not only gets complete access to the entire Android ecosystem but also relief knowing that they are managed, built and updated by the company that pioneered mobile security, the Canadian firm said. BlackBerry’s post informing users about the update promises more posts in the coming weeks so that the smartphone maker can pat itself on the back a few more times for its Android platform hardening.
