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Samsung Galaxy S7 is vulnerable to Meltdown attack, research reveals

The device was previously considered immune to the vulnerability

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Samsung’s Galaxy S7 smartphone is vulnerable to the Meltdown security vulnerability, according to researchers.

Researchers discovered the Meltdown glitch, along with Spectre, earlier this year. The glitches allowed unauthorized access to privileged memory. In other words, attackers could access memory reserved for CPU use and collect information from it.

Researchers previously though that the S7 was immune to the vulnerability. However, this new research shows otherwise.

The researchers, from Austria’s Graz Technical University, reportedly found a way to exploit the Meltdown vulnerability and attack S7 handsets.

The team will reveal their findings at the Black Hat security conference taking place in Las Vegas on Wednesday.

One of the researchers, Michael Shwarz, told Reuters that the team is looking into other smartphone models.

“There are potentially even more phones affected that we don’t know about yet,” he said.

“There are potentially hundreds of millions of phones out there that are affected by Meltdown and may not be patched because the vendors themselves do not know.”

In the case of Samsung, the company did know. The company rolled out patches in January and July to protect Galaxy S7 handsets against Meltdown.

Furthermore, there are no known cases of hackers using the vulnerability in the real world.

Samsung wouldn’t say how many Galaxy S7 devices were sold, but reports indicate it was one of the company’s most popular devices.

If you use a Galaxy S7, make sure you’ve downloaded all the security patches available for your device.

Source: Reuters

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