Trump using unsecured Android phone: report

Even though US president Donald Trump had been advised to give up his Android device for a secure mobile device vetted by the Secret Service, the new US prsident has decided to continue using his Android phone, a report in the The New York Times said.

Though the model and make of Trump's phone is unknown, it has been speculated to be a Samsung Galaxy S3 with a 4.8-inch Amoled display with HD resolution. The device has 64GB of onboard memory, a 1.4GHz Exynos 4412 SoC and 1GB of RAM.

Trump intends to maintain his existing Twitter account after taking over @potus since taking over as the US president and it was presumed that he would use a secure device for acessing the account.

However, The New York Times reported that this was not the case.

Reputed security analyst Bruce Schneier, who expressed surprise over the president continuing to use the device, explained to Politico, Trump's Android phone was a ''consumer'' device and easily vulnerable to hacks.

According to Schneier, the obvious hacks involving email accounts and Twitter passwords was a small risk, as compared to the risk of turning Trump's phone into a recording device with relatively simple hacks.

He added that a even a motivated hacker, leave alone a state-sponsored one, could potentially commandeer Trump's phone, use it to record conversations, and take pictures remotely.

Trump had been using the Android smartphone mainly to post on Twitter, according to The New York Times and not to make calls. The report said that it was not clear as to what security measures had been put in place on the device and how vulnerable he could be to someone stealing data or breaking into his Twitter account.

"The absolutely minimum Trump could do to protect our nation is to use a secure device to protect him from foreign spies and other threats," the report quoted senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon on the Intelligence Committee, as saying.