Beware! Google Pixel Hacked in Less than a Minute

Google’s new flagship smartphone, which runs the latest Android 7.0 Nougat operating system, supposedly succumbed to a team of hackers in less than 60 seconds.

| Updated: Monday, November 14, 2016, 13:55 [IST]

Not many days have passed since the launch of the Google Pixel smartphone, it seems the smartphone is not immune to hackers who want to infiltrate the device.

Beware! Google Pixel Hacked in Less than a Minute

While Pixel is the company's flagship product and is being considered possibly as the best Android smartphone to date. Surprisingly, it has just been hacked in less than 60 seconds.

As it happened, at a security conference in Seoul on Friday, a team of white-hat hackers from China's Qihoo 360, an internet security company, hacked into Google's brand-new Pixel phone in less than a minute.

The hackers demonstrated an exploit that cracked open the Android and gave them full remote code execution capability as well as access to personal information such as messages, phone calls, contacts and photos.

Considerably, the team from Qihoo used a zero-day vulnerability to remotely install code on Google's sought after device. As a result, the exploit launched Google Play Store and then Google's mobile version of Chrome before displaying a messaged that read "Pwned by 360 Alpha Team."

The team also won a cash prize of $120,000 for the hack and now Google has to hit their drawing board in trying to figure out how to fix the security loophole.

The good news is that the Goggle Pixel users do not have to worry about their phones being remotely accessed or their data being stolen. Fortunately, the Qihoo team belonging to the white-hat hackers group was only interested in displaying their skills and cashing in on the bounty offered by Google.

Pixel owners can relax as a patch should be released soon and their phones will no longer be vulnerable to this particular attack.

However, the hack just proves how critical it is for our phones to have a good security feature. It is even more frightening as these security vulnerabilities can give cybercriminals the authority to eavesdrop on victims, digitally pick their pockets, and utilize their devices in a wrongful manner

Additionally, with this level of apparent vulnerability for even the most high-end devices such as the Google Pixel itself, it pays to remember: always keep your devices updated and patched with the latest updates.