Today is one of those days when it is very easy to understand the importance of safety zones: With the firmware update, Samsung is fixed a serious breach of security that has affected each Galaxy mobile phone launched since 2014.
As described in the portal ZDNetit has been Mateusz Jurczyk, a security researcher at Google's Project Zero team, was in charge of highlighting this vulnerability. The security breach mentioned is present in Samsung mobiles with any version of Android released since 2014 and modified by the company. This is a critical risk, namely may allow attackers to extract malicious code from the device, without the need for user interaction.
May security prevent the problem
According to the researcher, the potential threat has given hackers the ability to use their code on Samsung's victim devices, using sends various multimedia messages – MMS-. Since Android, by default, also directs all images received with these types of messages to the "Skia" library for processing, the user could not prevent these files from being stored on the device. Apparently, only Samsung's centers have been affected by this problem, since South Korea is the only kind that has decided to make the change to the Android code to support Qmage image format.
In a video published by the researcher, you can see how easy was the process to use this vulnerability, which is available on Samsung's traditional messaging app installed at all company sites.
With various multimedia messages sent, the attacker managed locate the "Skia" library in device storage, to send the last MMS with exploit it is necessary to allow the execution of your code. As if that wasn't enough, and he explains that these types of attacks may have been carried out silently:
"I have found ways to completely process MMS messages without causing notification sound on Android, so it is possible to have a completely critical attack."
Risk found the month of February, and was reported to Samsung at the time. After a few months of work, Samsung said she had it Fixed issue with security update May, released by Google on the first Monday of this month, but that it has been close to a week has begun to reach Samsung's first terminals, and should gradually spread across its entire catalog.
In case you want to know more details about how the vulnerability is discovered, and the steps taken to take advantage of it and place and use the code on Samsung devices, Jurczyk provides a complete technical report containing all the details of the investigation.
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About Christian Collado
Growth Editor at Andro4all, specializing in SEO. I am studying software development and writing about technology, especially the Android world and everything related to Google since 2016. You can follow me On Twitter, email me if you have something to tell me, or contact me via my LinkedIn profile.
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