Following analysts’ report that hundreds of millions of Samsung’s higher-end Galaxy devices, including the latest flagship Galaxy S6, are vulnerable to hackers, the South Korean smart devices company has up their sleeves to save the customers from possible attacks.
According to NowSecure over 500 million people worldwide own devices with SwiftKey, which is the pre-installed keyboard that comes with the Samsung Galaxy S4 and S4 Mini, Galaxy S5 and S6, and cannot be deleted or uninstalled.
The flaw which revolves around SwiftKey’s update mechanism was discovered by Ryan Welton, a researcher from mobile security company NowSecure.
Now, in a blog post on Friday, Samsung disclosed that security updates would be implemented in the coming days via the KNOX security platform which has been installed in every model since the Galaxy S4.
“Samsung KNOX has the capability to update the security policies of our devices, over-the-air, to invalidate potential vulnerabilities caused by this issue,” the blog post said.
The likelihood of an attack being pulled off is incredibly small, according to Samsung, which said it would require “a very specific set of conditions for a hacker to be able to exploit a device this way.”
Ryan Welton, a security researcher with NowSecure, wrote in a blog post that the company first notified Samsung in December 2014 of the flaw, along with the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) and Google’s Android security team.
The vulnerability is not related to SwiftKey’s consumer apps in both the Google Play and Apple App Store.
“We supply Samsung with the core technology that powers the word predictions in their keyboard,” a statement posted Wednesday on SwiftKey’s website said. “It appears that the way this technology was integrated on Samsung devices introduced the security vulnerability. We are doing everything we can to support our long-time partner Samsung in their efforts to resolve this important security issue.”