Samsung apps allow you to spy on your phones and there is still no solution

Creating a computer program is not an easy task, but doing it without fail is even more complicated. This is what they demonstrate at Samsung after a security company analyzed the company’s applications preinstalled on their mobiles and discovered nothing less than more than a dozen problems.

It was the OverSecured firm that published a report detailing the company’s applications that have security vulnerabilities that even allow attackers to extract information from Samsung mobiles.

Spy on users, take control of the device … anything is possible

That there is a bug in an application that can be exploited is already a problem. That there are in more than a dozen of them is essential.

Problems range from programming errors that allow an attacker to take control of the device, to others that allow spying on what the user is doing on their smartphone.

Samsung fixed some of these bugs, but others have yet to be resolved, which is why analysts declined to give more details, so hackers could not take advantage of this poorly implemented code.

List of Samsung apps with security vulnerabilities

Sergey Toshin, founder of Oversecured, has analyzed the applications preinstalled on Samsung mobiles since the beginning of the year, and found problems in, at least, all of these:

• Knox Core (com.samsung.android.knox.containercore)
• Managed provisioning (com.android.managedprovisioning)
• Secure folder (com.samsung.knox.securefolder)
• SecSettings (com.android.settings)
• Samsung DeX system user interface (com.samsung.desktopsystemui)
• TelephonyUI (com.samsung.android.app.telephonyui)
• PhotoTable (com.android.dreams.phototable)

As you can see, there are a few quite important ones like the Secure Folder app or the System Settings app. These issues have already been reported to Samsung.

The problem is in three other bugs that have not yet been fixed, which Toshin did not give details of except that it would be possible to steal SMS information from the system and access playback information from the device.

Right now, if you have a Samsung mobile, there isn’t much you can do except wait for the affected apps to update to fix these issues. One more reason not to want bloatware on your mobile, something the European Union will be taking action on soon.