Hacking an Android phone can be as simple as typing in a really long password
Flickr/Rob Bulmahn
The vulnerability, discovered by John Gordon, is easy to exploit: simply open the phone's "Emergency Call" feature, type a few characters and the repeatedly copy-and-paste them. The pasted text becomes longer and longer - Gordon's reaches over 160,000 characters - and, as such, harder for the phone to handle.
Next, open the camera app which causes the phone to ask for a password into which the 160,000 character string is pasted. After a few minutes the phone restarts, booting straight to the unlocked home screen.
Gordon told CNN Money that he informed Google in August and the company has released a patch, but many users could remain affected due to the lag in Android software updates.
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