The popular cellphone maker, Samsung, suffered from a microchip security flaw in their Galaxy S7 Smartphones which could potentially pose a high risk for anyone using the cellphone model. Until recently, it was believed Samsung was one of the few tech companies that Meltdown had not and would not be able to affect. Meltdown is a vulnerability that allows an attacker to bypass the security on the cellular device and steal sensitive information from the memory of running apps like password managers, browsers, emails, and documents. Two over the air patches were released in January and in July. Since then a group from Austria’s Graz Technical University has revealed that they were able to use Meltdown on the Galaxy S7 device. There is currently an estimated 30 million people using the S7 model and this is not the only handheld device that is susceptible to these types of vulnerabilities. “There are potentially even more phones affected that we don’t know about yet. 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,” researcher Michael Schwarz said of the security flaw. The researchers from the university have unveiled their research into Meltdown and have stated that they have plans to find which other devices are still at risk, including the new Samsung model which was just announced.
