Android 16 VPN bug turns apps installed on your phone into a leaky sink
A bug in Android 16 has been discovered that allows apps to leak data outside of VPN tunnels. This vulnerability exposes users' real IP addresses regardless of their VPN settings. The issue was reported by a security engineer and confirmed by the VPN provider Mullvad.
- ▪The bug affects all VPN apps on Android 16 devices.
- ▪It allows any app to send traffic outside the VPN tunnel, compromising user privacy.
- ▪The vulnerability is linked to a system service called ConnectivityManager.
Digital Trends files mainly under tech. We currently carry 609 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Digital Trends |
| Canonical URL | https://www.digitaltrends.com/phones/android-16-vpn-bug-turns-apps-installed-on-your-phone-into-a-leaky-sink/ |
| Publication time | Thu, 21 May 2026 14:37:27 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-21T14:46:11.043Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-21T14:46:11.043Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | AhL_vc5ALNMX |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
That VPN you are running on your Android 16 device may not be doing as much as you think. A newly discovered bug in Android 16 allows any app on your device to send traffic outside your VPN tunnel, exposing your real IP address to the internet, regardless of which VPN you use or how locked down your settings are. The vulnerability was first reported by a Zurich-based security engineer going by the handle @cybaqkebm, and was later flagged by VPN provider Mullvad, which confirmed the bug affects all VPN apps on Android 16, not just its own.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Digital Trends.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Digital Trends
