Stefan Mileschin

Tame Apple Press jumps on the news

The Tame Apple Press is over the moon after it was discovered that its favourite vendor’s rival might suffer from a meltdown flaw.

The Galaxy 7 and other smartphones made by Samsung were previously thought to be immune to a security vulnerability known as Meltdown, which researchers said affected most of the world’s PCs, smartphones and other computing devices.

Researchers from Austria’s Graz Technical University told Reuters they have figured out a way to exploit the Meltdown vulnerability to attack Galaxy S7 handsets.

The team plans to release its findings on Wednesday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. They are looking into Meltdown’s impact on other makes and models of smartphones and expect to uncover more vulnerable devices soon, said researcher Michael Schwarz.

However the Tame Apple Press should not be too quick to cheer. The S7 uses the quad-core Snapdragon 820. The current brand that Apple has to beat is the S8 which uses the Snapdragon 835 chips.

The researchers say that there are potentially even more phones affected that we don’t know about yet. There are potentially hundreds of million of phones out there that are affected by Meltdown and may not be patched because the vendors themselves do not know.

Samsung said it created a patch to protect Galaxy S7 handsets against Meltdown that it began pushing out to affected users last month.

“Samsung takes security very seriously and our products and services are designed with security as a priority”, the company said in a statement.

There were no reported cases where Meltdown had been exploited to attack an S7 handset and no other Samsung phones are known to be vulnerable.

https://fudzilla.com/news/mobile/469...-from-meltdown