MILLIONS of Android owners have been warned that their phone is now at greater risk of chilling cyber attacks. Last year, Google pledged seven years worth of support to its new phones, including the Pixel 8 and 9 lineups - but that was not always the case. The vast majority of Google phones have just three to five years worth of software support - and that includes security patches.
One of those phones has just hit its quota: The Pixel 5a. The August 2024 security update, which fixed nearly 50 different cyber flaws , was the Pixel 5a's last. Earlier this week, Google released a security update for Pixel owners, dated 2024-09-01, that covers 11 both "high" and "critical" vulnerabilities.
READ MORE ON ANDROID One vulnerability, only on Pixel phones, actually gave hackers a backdoor into your device. Last month, an inactive piece of software inside all Pixel handsets was found to make phones “accessible to hackers and ripe for man-in-the-middle attacks, code injection, and spyware," according to cybersecurity firm iVerify. The risk was enough that Palantir, a US software giant, banned Android devices across the company, The Verge reported.
At the time, Google said it had “seen no evidence of any active exploitation". Most read in Phones & Gadgets However, the tech giant has since patched the issue, alongside another that improves Wi-Fi stability and performance on Pixel phones. The Pixel 5a, Google's mid-range variant of the Pixel 5, launched in August 2021 with just three y.