Gadgetory

one of the reasons we all love Android is because it can do so many things especially when rooted unfortunately with that comes the ability for bad guys to do many things especially when looted I'm Joe Levi this is PocketNow today we're going to talk about how to harden your android against hacking attacks this is my nexus 4 and the app I want to show you today is called a sec droid sec dro ID it's available both from xda-developers in the thread it's also available from the Play Store which is where I got this one from it's available in both free and donate versions the donate version costs about $1 u.s. this is an alpha its version 0.3 it is under current development and there's a lot of stuff going on with it so things can change as more stuff is hardened and and made secure for you so what exactly does this do well very simply this app execute a script that hardens your Android for more information you can visit the thread essentially you've got a computer in your hand it's running a variant of Linux and that variant of Linux has all kinds of tools on it some of those tools are SSH SSH detail net netcat ping p.m. that's package manager and ADB all of those are potential attack vectors you don't need to be running them all the time so with the simple push of a button you can then take care of it that's that's it that's all it takes you're done your device is now secured against attacks through those vectors with a little bit of a caveat ADB is only disabled until next boot so if you need to use ADB you have to reboot your device if you want to secure against potential adb attacks you want to go ahead and run this again so that's the app there's not an awful lot to show what it does it does in the background and it does it oh pretty simply now here's the catch it only works on rooted devices kind of ironic because rooted devices are usually the devices that we don't need this kind of protection what do I mean by that well if I'm running on a rooted device I've got an app called super user or super su which is super superuser it essentially is an app that lets me decide which apps get super user permissions you know the ones that get to do bad stuff like steal my identity and inject all kinds of code and stuff where I don't want it unrooted devices don't have that protection those are the devices that really need the protection here's another irony when you have a device that you want to root you can either route it the Nexxus way which is officially sanctioned by Google kind of or you can exploit a security hole to get route to one of those very security holes that this app intends to patch so I know it sounds terribly terribly ironic but if you want to secure your Android and harden it from hacking attacks you need to route it you need to be running a super user app like super user or super su and you probably want to run a script just like the one I just showed you once you've done that your Android is going to be significantly more secure than the one that you got from your OEM or from your carrier if you like what you saw here today and maybe you learned a little bit of something please give the video a thumbs up why not share it with your friends on Facebook Twitter or Google+ pocket now is on all of those for pocket now showing off ways that you can harden your android against potential hacking attempts I'm Joe Levi thanks for watching