Some versions of Android in use by government employees go all the way back to 2017's Android 8, and that's a huge cybersecurity problem.
Tero Vesalainen, Getty Images/iStockphoto
Android, the most popular mobile operating system in the world, runs on plenty of devices used by U.S. government workers, but only 0.08% of those devices are running the latest version of Android, a report finds.
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Mobile security firm Lookout is behind the report, which looked at over 200 million mobile devices being used by U.S. federal and state government workers between January 2019 and December 2020. It found that the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a massive shift to mobile device use for government employees, which makes the security statistics it uncovered even more concerning.
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"The rate at which [government employee] devices are exposed to mobile phishing, app threats, device and network threats is increasing," Lookout said. Phishing attacks may be a matter of training users to avoid falling for tricks, but other attacks against government devices attempting to leverage known vulnerabilities, and older versions of Android are rife with them.
The breakdown in Android versions among government devices is alarming, as is the number of government android users running outdated versions
