Samsung tagged along with Google over this past summer to announce that it would be releasing monthly security updates for its Android phones, and another page on the calendar means that a slough of patches are hitting Samsung phones this week.
According to Google’s Project Zero team, a group of security researchers, Samsung’s timing couldn’t have been better.
The Project Zero team took the Samsung Galaxy S6 edge and poured through the software for an entire week, looking for security flaws. And, unfortunately for Samsung, the group was able to uncover 11 so-called “high-impact security issues.” The worst of the bugs even let an enterprising hacker write files to the system without permission.
The goal of the security blitz was to see if they could find ways to gain access to messages, photos, and contacts remotely or through an app from the Google Play Store that didn’t include required permissions. The researchers also tried to create files that would remain on the phone after a factory restore.
The bugs they found were discovered pretty quickly, and didn’t take much work to exploit, which obviously makes their presence a big security risk. That being said, by the time the team reported the bugs to Samsung, the company had already patched eight of the security holes, and the remaining ones were the least severe of the bunch.
Samsung’s monthly security fix updates should be making their way to your phone in the coming days, so look out for that and be sure to keep your software up-to-date each month. And while you’re at it, be sure to check out updates from Project Zero.
[source]Mashable[/source]
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