A serious flaw in the processor manufactured by MediaTek has made roughly a third of smartphones and IoT devices (distributed worldwide) vulnerable to spying.
As suggested by the media, the vulnerability in Mediatek’s processors, in theory, allows for remote eavesdropping of telephone conversations and what is reaching the microphone from the user’s environment. This may apply to a third of the devices produced with CPU Mediatek .
Israeli cybersecurity company Check Point has detected a problem with the part of the chip that handles the beeps. It can be used by hackers to eavesdrop on conversations of Android users. In practice, however, the chance of this is quite slim, as a hacker would need physical access to the device to install malware that would use the Android sound processor’s connection to spy. There is also no evidence that the found vulnerability was exploited.
