The panic button should help you exit quickly any shady link you access
(Mirror Daily, United States) – Many smartphone users fell victims to all sorts of hackings while tapping on weird links or downloading questionable apps without thinking twice. Google wants to avoid such situations, and again comes to the help of Android users with a solution: a panic button.
How should this panic button work?
XDA-Developers and Bleeping Computer explained how Google wanted to help users which access malicious links, since it happens to the best of us. The company was planning to add a panic button to Android 7.1 which, upon tapping it, lets you make an emergency exit and escape danger.
Therefore, as soon as you realize something’s not right with the link you have just accessed, you can immediately get out of there. The panic button functions in the following way. As soon as you get alarmed, tap the back button four times. Then, Android enters in panic mode and exits all open apps. Therefore, you can still escape even if the app is threatening to take control of everything.
Smartphones are often targeted by hackers
This idea came just in time, since the danger is real. In April, a security firm discovered several hundred apps from the Play Store came with vulnerabilities, which made Android phones a sure target for hackers. It wasn’t the first time when this happened, and it won’t probably be the last time either.
Unfortunately for careless users, you cannot use the panic button yet. Google is either testing it at the moment, or maybe is waiting for a better time to launch it. Even so, there might be quite plenty of time until the company decided to roll the feature out. In the meantime, you can try to be a little more careful to what links you access, and avoid making your phone vulnerable to hackers.
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