Your Android lock screen could be easy to crack (video)

16 Sep 2015

Very little is truly secure in this digital age, with numerous options out there to crack smartphone lock screens. But this one seems too easy.

Approaches to breaking through lock screens on phones are numerous, many merely involving an SD card with the right hack installed on it.

But this approach to bypassing an Android lock screen, uploaded to YouTube by jgor null yesterday, is remarkably straightforward.

Drop an immensely long string of characters into the emergency dial option and the wheels are in motion.

From there you keep copying and pasting it longer and longer, before saving it all to a clipboard.

An insecure Android lock screen

With that stored, the hack involves the opening of the camera, from the lock screen. When opening the options menu, put in the long string of characters into the password prompt.

It takes several minutes but, as the phone tries to make sense of just how wrong your password insert is, it eventually unlocks.

As Arstechnica points out, the 5.1.1 Android update fixes this.

YouTuber Marek Bialoglowy points this out too, with his LG G4 on 5.1 not allowing an option for the copy and paste to clipboard when in emergency dial.

Main image via Shutterstock

Gordon Hunt was a journalist with Silicon Republic

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