Hackers Alert | Samsung Galaxy S3 Isn’t Safe As Much As You Think

It appears that hackers are getting smarter day by day. Recently, a triathlon of pesky hackers reportedly breached Samsung Galaxy S3’s security measures, by remotely swiping the cellphone wiped clean like a good old slate. Think your S3 is crème la crème with respect to software protection?

How does it Work?

How does one go on about hacking various Samsung Galaxy SIII models as easily as sending an SMS? More so, this current security threat is so open ended that anyone who knows his way around a laptop, or a computer for that reason, can easily swipe the phone back to its factory settings.

Imagine getting your Samsung cellphone getting hacked 3 or 4 times in a row. You will definitely stop bothering about restoring the settings to your previous ones, as the factory data kind of wipes everything back to the brand new state. This interesting case of susceptible remote hack was raised at the recent Ekoparty Security Conference.

According to various online bloggers, the remote reset on Samsung Galaxy S3 works on the basis of four different approaches:

1. SMS
2. Push Through Website
3. QR Code
4. NFC

There’s no way of detecting the attack. Once initiated the Phone doesn’t even let out a mouse squeak. You won’t notice the “difference” as long as you haven’t touched the phone of gone through those settings that were personalized by you. At the moment, other than Samsung Galaxy S3, other Samsung models are also on the hit list.

• Samsung Galaxy S2
• Samsung Galaxy Ace
• Samsung Galaxy Beam
• Samsung Galaxy S Advance

It seems that Samsung’s TouchWiz UI is somehow assisting hackers to initiate this remote security breach. Worst case scenario, the S3 is completely prone to a SIM reset or a SIM burnout. In the next few weeks, Samsung will be releasing a patch to fix this issue. The patch will be made available through your relevant career service providers.

As a side precaution, DO NOT click any untrusted website links. Also disable automatic NFC and QR code recognition on your cellphones; you’ll thank me later for doing so.