A massive 99,2% of US government Android users run outdated operating systems, exposing themselves to hundreds of vulnerabilities.
Due to Covid-19, the majority of government employees had to shift rapidly to remote-work. Meaning, workers started to use their mobile devices to access government data more than ever before, in turn creating a vast attack surface for cybercriminals.
Rachel Welch, chief operating officer of Atlas VPN, comments: “These figures are a massive concern since government agencies store extremely sensitive information. If that data falls into the wrong hands, it could cause large-scale havoc.”
According to the analysis, as many as 22,8% of the US government workers still use the Android 8 operating system.
This version, Android Oreo, was released to the public on 21 August 2017 and has 636 known vulnerabilities.
Moving forward, 28,2% of federal, state and local government employees use the Android 9 operating system. According to publicly-available data, this OS has 173 publicly known vulnerabilities. This version, Android Pie, was released on 6 August 2018.
Next up is Android 10, the most popular operating system amongst the US government employees. Over 38,3% of workers run this OS on their Android devices. This operating system has more than 266 vulnerabilities known to date and was originally released on 3 September 2019.