Vulnerability in all Samsung smartphones released since 2014

[AlexJ]

For anyone who has old Samsung smartphone, you should be aware of newly discovered vulnerability which affects all Samsung smartphones released since 2014. This is a remote vulnerability so you do not need to download anything in order for your phone to become compromised, it can spread through SMS messaging.

Samsung security vulnerability exposed on Android phones - 9to5Google

A security vulnerability on Samsung's Android phones sold since 2014 left the door open for attackers, but it's in the process of being patched.

9to5google.com

It has been already patched on new phones such as Galaxy S10 and S20 but if you have old phone - most likely it will not be patched or patched at later time. Samsung does not like to support old phones in terms of security, they have already moved Galaxy S8 phones to a quarterly update schedule from a monthly security update schedule. This does not affect any other Android phone by any other manufacturer.

 

[CarefulDriver]

Interesting... I thought security flaws are software specific, not hardware. This means, it should depend on the Android version, not phone hardware.

 

[AlexJ]

It does depend on Android version. Samsung does heavy customizations to the Android OS on all their phones, this is why only their phones are affected by it. This is one of the major advantages of Android since companies like Samsung can customize OS and add or modify features (Samsung phones traditionally had a lot of new features even before they appeared on phones by Google and other manufacturers) not related to Google services. Of course such customizations may also lead to unique exploits, such as in this case.