Comment by hospitalJail | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hospitalJail | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I don't trust google for multiple reasons, wont use them for anything important or start new services, I am careful to what I search, etc...

However, as far as my knowledge tells me Google is the best in the biz when it comes to security. While iPhones 0 click exploits cause the death of journalists and leak nudes of billionaires; The biggest 'Android' exploit Pegasus has requires going to some website, downloading an APK, going to settings, clicking allow install from web, then installing the malware. (Don't @me about Samsung hardware issues, if you cared about quality/did research, you wouldn't have bought a Samsung Android. Or heck, anything from Samsung.)

Google is a crap company that I barely use(at most degoogled services and the occasional search when DDG can't do it), but we should give companies credit when they do things well. It promotes competency over relentless marketing.

Are you sure about biggest Android exploit?

Tests conducted by Project Zero confirm that those four vulnerabilities allow an attacker to remotely compromise a phone at the baseband level with no user interaction, and require only that the attacker know the victim's phone number. [1]

[1] https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2023/03/multiple-inte...

Do you have evidence Pegasus used this?

To be exact, those aren't exploits of android itself, just the device it's running on. Not much of a difference in the outcome, but i guess it doesn't defeat the argument of google having good platform

This is a recent one. Whatsapp bug [1] exposed both Android and iOS few years back. And then there was MMS exploit [2] that affected close to 95% of android phones

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/4da1117e-756c-11e9-be7d-6d846537a...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagefright_(bug)

While Stagefright "affected" them, it often wasn't exploitable. Not to mention that was 5+ years ago and they've since sandboxed all codecs, mitigating potential threats from that vector in the future.

Not disagreeing, but consider the user base of iOS vs Android. iOS users are wealthier/etc., so exploits affecting them seem more likely to be “newsworthy” and, hence, more likely to be pursued (higher upside).

Similarly, consider how a sunken ferry that killed hundreds of migrants went largely unnoticed during the brouhaha surrounding the Titanic sub.

https://zerodium.com/program.html

Zerodium pays more for Android zero click FCP(full chain with persistence) than on iOS zero click FCP. Most other categories Android and iOS exploits pay the same.

Google is substantially wiretapped

This is baseless fud.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com