Secure Your Android Device with SecDroid

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Personal information security has been a prime concern for computer users since nearly the beginning of computing itself. Malicious users find exploits and develop viruses, trojans, and rootkits to gain control of our devices to use them for their own advantage. This not only costs us in form of degraded performance and potential data usage costs, but can also have more dire consequences such as our financial information being sniffed and used to withdraw money from our accounts, or identity theft that could land us in serious trouble with law enforcement.

Previously, these issues were major concerns primarily on desktop computers, but with the massive popularity in mobile devices, such malicious individuals and groups have now started targeting popular mobile platforms. While Google has included better security measures in the latest versions of Android and several antivirus vendors have also developed solutions to get rid of such malware from our devices, it’s always a good idea to secure our devices as much as possible to prevent any security breaches from happening in the first place. To help you with this, XDA Senior Member x942 has developed SecDroid, an Android app that secures your devices against several intrusion methods.

SecDroid achieves this by disabling several services on your device that most users will not require to be running all the time. These services include SSH, SSHD, Telnet NC (net cat), and Ping, to keep others from gaining access to your device via a remote terminal. SecDroid also disables Package Manager so that no apps can be installed remotely to your device (you can still install them from Market or using APK files directly on the device itself). Lastly, it also allows you to disable ADBD (the ADB service running on the device that allows you to connect to it through command line from a remote computer) until the next reboot.

SecDroid is currently in active development, and this is its first alpha release. The developer has also released the source code of SecDroid under the GPLv2 license. You can find more details and the download link in the forum thread.