What if an attacker gained system level access to your mobile phone? What could they achieve with that data? In light of recent new Android vulnerabilities, this is no longer a purely theoretical exercise.

Stagefright was published widely on 27 July (by  Zimperium ), and there are implications (by  Trend Micro  & comment section) that it has been out in the wild for considerably longer. Among its potential attacks are reading / writing files with same privileges OS mediaserver has.

It is fair to assume that over time a commonly available exploit will be made available that allows either system level read access or screen scraping, both enough to gather critical information for further, more profitable attacks.

Trend Micro claims they know of no publicly available attacks so far.

Root access to your mobile phone means your following identity resources are likely to be compromised:

With these resources, the damage potential is staggering:

Given the damage potential, we recommend immediate action to mitigate the attack potential, and to reduce the damage in case your credentials are already lost.

Since the published vulnerability is recent, it is unlikely that you or your administrators have been targeted unless you and your company are in a high impact, high visibility position. Taking the above steps without resetting your phone should be enough. However, it is probably worth considering these issues organization wide and ensuring that nobody is no longer vulnerable to the attack.

While this specific vulnerability will be patched within few weeks or months on all up to date devices, it is certain that similar attacks will be discovered given the current pace of new feature additions to mobile operating systems.