MediaTek Inc. is a Taiwanese fabless semiconductor company.
It provides chips for wireless communications, high-definition television, handheld mobile devices like smartphones and tablet computers, navigation systems, consumer multimedia products, and digital subscriber line services as well as optical disc drives.
This company is not heard about that often and its popularity level isn’t that big compared to other companies. So it is not a surprise if many of you find this information new.
It also doesn’t help a lot when MediaTek’s phones already are sporting a bad reputation for being tardy or missing system updates.
But in some cases, it’s totally unfair to blame them when scores of low-end brands traditionally use their chips, then totally lack the resources to update their phones in the first place. It’s not always necessarily the chipmaker’s fault if a MediaTek-powered phone doesn’t get updated.
Nobody knows if it’s true or MediaTek is making their PR director say that, but Kevin Keating did say that it’s all on Qualcomm for spreading rumors, but they never had any heating issues.
And I am certainly not here to say all this about MediaTek, but painfully enough, it’s the truth, and it also doesn’t help that the new MediaTek smartphone chip has some security flaws.
Its stock also fell, by like, 20%. Its revenue is 32,215 crores.
It was founded on 28 May 1997, by Tsai Ming-kai. Its headquarters is located in Hsinchu, Taiwan. As of 2019, the company has 17,554 employees working in it. Its current CEO is Tsai Ming-kai.
This company has got some fierce competitors too. They include Qualcomm, Broadcom, MaxLinear, Silicon Labs, SPIL, Marvell Technology, PANJIT International, Hisilicon, Unigroup Guoxin Microelectronics, Novatek Microelectronics, and Realtek Semiconductor. MediaTek surely should avoid any mistakes in the future, seeing these many competitors are out to take their place, and well, sure enough, if MediaTek doesn’t correct the flaws.
Compared to, for example, Snapdragon, Snapdragon’s the best. But MediaTek is more cost-efficient.
These security flaws in question are surely so fatal and drastic, that it makes everyone worry about their safety. As these security flaws include audio digital signal processors in IoT devices and smartphones.
But is currently deemed okay, as security patches have been issued to fix these problems.
In case these security flaws weren’t discovered in time, those Android users would have fallen under a major hacker attack(Allegedly, 37%). The hacker would have gained the ability to eavesdrop on Android users, elevate privileges and execute commands. Just imagine the rampage it would have caused. It’s causing a rampage now, so to speak.
Three flaws were found in the DSP firmware with one further problem taking place in the SOC’s hardware abstraction layer. CPR’s research team reports that these attacks could have exploited it to execute and hide malicious code within the DSP system, which would have given the hackers access to potentially eavesdrop on the user.
Said security flaws were actually found inside the chip’s audio processor.
So, it really is a good thing that a promising solution to the problem was dispatched with MediaTek’s patch update which came out in October.
