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Android was the most vulnerable product of 2016

How secure is your smartphone? If you happen to be using an Android smartphone it probably isn’t very secure at all.

The folks over at CVE Details have compiled a list detailing the most vulnerable products as well as the vendors that have the most vulnerabilities across their products. In 2015 Mac OS X took the top spot for products with 444 vulnerabilities being found.

That figure however, is small fry.

In 2016 as many as 523 vulnerabilities were found in Android. That represents growth of as much as 300% from 2015 where only 125 bugs were found on the platform. Even Flash had less vulnerabilities in 2016 with only 266 weak points found.

Following closely behind Android is Debian Linux and Ubuntu Linux with 319 and 278 vulnerabilities respectively. As The Register points out though, these vulnerabilities might come from third party packages included in distributions of those operating systems.

The developers at Android can thank the hacking gods that they aren’t Oracle. The vendor which owns Java clocked in 793 reported vulnerabilities in 2016 with Google in close pursuit with 698. Adobe, Microsoft and Novell sit at third, fourth and fifth place with 548, 492 and 394 vulnerabilities found respectively.

It’s worth noting that while Adobe has four of the ten most vulnerable products including Flash, Acrobat and Acrobat Reader.

Of course we can’t say, Android is an easy target and full of holes and that’s why it tops the list. The reason for the surge in vulnerabilities being found might be linked to Google’s tempting bug bounty programme which offers white-hat hackers massive sums of money in reward for reporting vulnerabilities.

Here’s hoping there are less bugs to find in 2017.

[Via – The Register][Image – CC BY 2.0 Uncalno Tekno]

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