According to a paper presented this week by University of California professor Zhiyun Qian, the developers of commercial root apps work hard to break the security of Android devices — and then malware developers either piggyback on those exploits or figure out how they work and incorporate them into their own apps.
Somewhere between 27 and 47 percent of all Android smartphones are rooted, said Qian. This allows users to get rid of pre-installed apps that are otherwise impossible to remove, to personalize their phones beyond what is allowed by the official limits, to get better backups, or better power management tools.
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Read full article at CSO magazine.
Article also reprinted in Computerworld.
