ShareIt is a popular android mobile app that allows using sharing files from one device to another between nearby phones. And has been downloaded more than a billion times!
But for the past few months, it has failed to patch security concerns and vulnerability that may lead to data leaks or certain malfunctions within the user’s device.
According to Trend Micro, it has shown that security issues in such applications can be abused and even leak a user’s sensitive data with ShareIt, by using a malicious code or app.
Researcher’s Statement:
Echo Duan and Jesse Chang Researchers at Trend Micro stated that ‘vulnerability could potentially lead to Remote Code Execution (RCE)’. The researchers have notified Google of the app’s terrifying potential.
They also said that “We reported these vulnerabilities to the vendor, who has not responded yet. We decided to disclose our research three months after reporting this since many users might be affected by this attack because the attacker can steal sensitive data and do anything with the apps’ permission. It is also not easily detectable”.
ShareIt’s Terrifying Power:
It seems that ShareIt can access the entire storage and all types of personal media, use the camera and microphone, location, and many more! Also has the ability to delete other apps, create accounts, set passwords and have access to your network properties. (which is way too much of course, to have these many limitless unsecured restrictions for an app that is used just for sharing ).
Few Users have detected that ShareIt has been mainly been used as a Chinese Spyware and has installed several unrelated, extra apps over the device without any sort of the user’s permission. Also contained random pop-ups and advertisements and random text messages which is quite a much and should be uninstalled immediately to prevent any further data leaks or breach within your device.
ShareIT developers haven’t given much thought to limit the app’s capabilities, this can give hackers access to all files in ShareIt’s “private” directory. Also, this vulnerability allows the hackers to call on ShareIt’s file-content provider and pass it a file path to get access to all of its data files. This allows third-party apps to edit the data ShareIt uses to run, including the app cache generated during install and runtime.
Some Alternatives To ShareIt:
This one particular single-purpose app known as ShareIt contains a large amount of data on your device and can store it within their cache leading your data to be leaked without any concern. So it’s better to delete ShareIT and find some alternatives. So far here are some best alternatives we could find:
- Google Files: Completely Free and only available on Android, with its seamless transfer easy to transfer, and simple clean UI.
- Send Anywhere (File Transfer): Free with some limitations, quite annoying ads at the wrong time, depends on Internet, well secured.
- Zapya: Heavily popular and quite competitive to ShareIT, transferring is very smooth, cross-platform (can transfer across iOS, Android, PC ). It has quite a lot of permission that needs to be allowed before transferring ( but, security and encryption are up-to-date patched) and ads.
What do you think? Is ShareIT really a threat and has it installed or misused any sort of your app privileges? Let us know down below
Source via ArsTechnica
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