Government issues ‘critical’ warning for Android phone users: These versions affected and how to protect against hacking

India’s cybersecurity agency, CERT-In, has raised an alarm for Android smartphone owners, assigning a “critical” severity rating to a cluster of newly-uncovered vulnerabilities inside Google’s mobile operating system. The security note, designated CIVN-2026-0454 and released on September 14, warns that the weaknesses leave users’ mobile phones open to severe security breaches, including remote hacking, service outages and data theft. The warning directly applies to all individual consumers as well as enterprise organisations running hardware on the impacted operating systems.

“Multiple vulnerabilities have been identified in Android which could be exploited by an attacker to execute arbitrary code causing denial of service, privilege escalation or disclosure of sensitive information on the targeted system,” Cert-In said.