Researchers from the University of California Riverside's Bourns College of Engineering have identified a weakness in Android which allows personal data to be obtained from apps.
Tested against seven popular apps the method was between 82 and 92 percent successful on six of them, only Amazon with a 48 percent success rate proved more difficult to crack. Most vulnerable were Gmail and H&R Block on 92 percent, followed by Newegg (86 percent), WebMD (85 percent), CHASE Bank (83 percent) and Hotels.com (83 percent).
Although demonstrated on Android the researchers believe their method will work on iOS and Windows devices too because they share a key feature exploited in the Android system.
The attack works by getting a user to download a seemingly benign app, such as one to display background wallpaper on a phone. Once the malicious app is installed, the researchers can exploit a newly discovered public side channel, the shared memory statistics of a process, which can be accessed without any privileges
betanews/ full article here/ http://betanews.com/2014/08/22/gmail-app-hacked-with-92-percent-success-rate/.
