US Government Warns About Google Pixel Update Deadline

The U.S. Government has asked federal employees to update their Pixel devices before July 4 or "discontinue use of the product", according to a report by Forbes.The announcement comes as Alphabet-ow...

RTT Staff Writer•Monday, June 24, 2024•1 min read

The U.S. Government has asked federal employees to update their Pixel devices before July 4 or “discontinue use of the product”, according to a report by Forbes.

The announcement comes as Alphabet-owned (GOOG) Google stated about a high-severity firmware vulnerability in the Android operating system, which could leave the devices to “limited, targeted exploitation”.

“Android Pixel contains an unspecified vulnerability in the firmware that allows for privilege escalation,” read the government’s warning in Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, managed by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

GrapheneOS, an operating system based on Android, posted on X/Twitter, “CVE-2024-32896 which is marked as being actively exploited in the wild in the June 2024 Pixel Update Bulletin is the 2nd part of the fix for CVE-2024-29748 vulnerability”.

The organization noted that the issue is not limited to Pixel devices only, but extends to all Android devices.

However, GrapheneOS added that the issue has been resolved in Pixel devices with the June update, while the same will be resolved in Android devices with Android 15 update.

“If they don’t update to Android 15, they probably won’t get the fix, since it has not been backported,” the firm added.