A set of non updated security flaws could allow threat actors to gain near complete control of some Samsung devices. In a report published by cybersecurity researcher Sergey Toshin, it is mentioned that this attack consists of tricking users into accessing their SMS messages.
As if that weren’t enough, a threat actor could abuse two separate flaws to manipulate arbitrary files with elevated permissions, not to mention that these attacks can be triggered without the need for user interaction.
Samsung is already aware of these vulnerabilities, though it could take up to two months for an update patch to be released. While the flaws are being corrected, users of Samsung devices are advised to verify that they have the latest firmware version installed.
The researcher found more than a dozen vulnerabilities in Samsung devices in a span of less than six months, and while many of the reported flaws have already been corrected, Samsung appears to have no plans to address all of the reports received. A particularity of these reports is that some of the flaws reside in tools preinstalled on these devices, including Secure Folder.
About the affected device models, it has been confirmed that the Samsung Galaxy S10+ models contain these flaws. On the other hand, the company’s official reports seem to confirm the little interest in addressing all the flaws: “No known issues have been reported and users should be sure that their sensitive information is not at risk. We addressed the potential vulnerability by developing and issuing security patches through a software update in April and May 2021 as soon as we identified this problem”.
The expert also alerted Samsung about issues that may have helped the bad actors to recover the contents of the SD card.
To learn more about information security risks, malware variants, vulnerabilities and information technologies, feel free to access the International Institute of Cyber Security (IICS) websites.
He is a cyber security and malware researcher. He studied Computer Science and started working as a cyber security analyst in 2006. He is actively working as an cyber security investigator. He also worked for different security companies. His everyday job includes researching about new cyber security incidents. Also he has deep level of knowledge in enterprise security implementation.