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	"title": "Hack Brief: Emergency-Number Hack Bypasses Android Lock Screens",
	"llm_title": "",
	"authors": "",
	"file_creation_date": "0001-01-01T00:00:00Z",
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	"plain_text": "https://www.wired.com/2015/09/hack-brief-new-emergency-number-hack-easily-bypasses-android-lock-screens/\n\nHack Brief: Emergency-Number Hack Bypasses Android Lock\n\nScreens\n\nBy Andy Greenberg\n\nPublished: 2015-09-15 · Archived: 2026-10-18 02:04:52 UTC\n\nIf you protect your Android phone with a password rather than an unlock pattern or PIN, you may want to keep it\n\nin your sight a little more carefully than usual. A new, dead-simple attack could allow anyone who gets their hands\n\non it to bypass that password lock with no more skill than it takes to cut and paste a long string of characters.\n\nThe Hack\n\nA security analyst at the University of Texas's information security office in Austin has discovered that the\n\nwidespread version 5 of Android is vulnerable to an easy lock-screen-bypass attack. The hack consists of basic\n\nsteps like entering a long, arbitrary collection of characters into the phone's Emergency Call dial pad and\n\nrepeatedly pressing the camera shutter button. UT's John Gordon, who outlines the full hack in this security notice\n\nand demonstrates it in the video below, says the trick offers full access to the apps and data on affected phones.\n\nAnd by using that access to enable developer mode, he says that an attacker could also connect to the phone via\n\nUSB and install malicious software.\n\n\"My concern when I found this...was thinking about a malicious state actor or someone else with temporary access\n\nto your phone,\" he says. \"If, say, you give your phone to a TSA agent during extended screening, they could take\n\nsomething from it or plant something on it without you knowing.\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?t=394\u0026v=J-pFCXEqB7A\n\nGordon says he stumbled on the lock screen vulnerability while messing with his phone during a long East Texas\n\nroad trip. \"I'm sitting in the passenger seat, bored, with no signal on my phone, so I start poking around and seeing\n\nwhat unexpected behavior I can cause,\" he says. \"A few idle hours of tapping every conceivable combination of\n\nelements on the screen can do wonders for finding bugs.\"\n\nWho's Affected?\n\nGordon tested the attack only on Nexus devices, but he believes it likely works on other Android devices that use\n\nversion 5 of the operating system. He reported the issue to Google in late June, and Google issued a patch for the\n\nproblem last month. But given Android's problem of depending on carriers to push out patches to devices, Gordon\n\nbelieves that most of the affected phones remain vulnerable for now. Google hasn't yet responded to WIRED's\n\nrequest for comment.\n\nThe issue is limited to phones that use a password rather than a PIN or pattern. That's a small fraction of the\n\nmillions of potentially vulnerable devices. But, perversely, it may affect the most security-sensitive Android\n\nowners most, since a long password generally offers tighter security than Android's other log-in options.\n\nPage 1 of 2\n\nhttps://www.wired.com/2015/09/hack-brief-new-emergency-number-hack-easily-bypasses-android-lock-screens/\n\nHow Severe is This?\n\nIn some respects, this attack may be more of a curiosity than a critical threat. (Google itself labelled the problem\n\nas \"moderate severity.\") After all, it does require physical access to the phone—rather than allowing a hacker to\n\nbreak into it remotely, like the text-message-based Stagefright exploit.\n\nEven so, those with vulnerable devices should install any available security updates, consider switching from a\n\npasscode to a PIN or pattern unlock, and watch where you leave your phone. Now would be an especially bad\n\ntime to forget it at the bar.\n\nSource: https://www.wired.com/2015/09/hack-brief-new-emergency-number-hack-easily-bypasses-android-lock-screens/\n\nPage 2 of 2",
	"extraction_quality": 1,
	"language": "EN",
	"sources": [
		"MITRE"
	],
	"origins": [
		"web"
	],
	"references": [
		"https://www.wired.com/2015/09/hack-brief-new-emergency-number-hack-easily-bypasses-android-lock-screens/"
	],
	"report_names": [
		"hack-brief-new-emergency-number-hack-easily-bypasses-android-lock-screens"
	],
	"threat_actors": [],
	"ts_created_at": 1792293858,
	"ts_updated_at": 1792375929,
	"ts_creation_date": 0,
	"ts_modification_date": 0,
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