Samsung hasn’t been using their current flagship device, the Galaxy S III, to combat Apple’s latest and greatest, even publishing ads that poke fun at the Cupertino company, suggesting it doesn’t take a “genius” to see [to them] that the Galaxy S III is superior. However, it really doesn’t take a genius to visit a website accidentally and if done with the Galaxy S III, users could find themselves when a device that has been completely wiped, remotely.
According to a story from Forbes.com, this vulnerability which Samsung has yet to acknowledge, was discovered by Ravi Borgaonkar at the Ekoparty security conference. This exploit utilizes USSD codes, which are codes that devices use in order to communicate with their respective carriers. In this case, a malicious website, which can be accessed by either clicking a link, scanning a QR code or even using the much hyped Samsung feature S-Beam, which uses NFC technology, can lead unsuspecting users to a website, that once accessed will begin to wipe their data from their phone, with no way to stop it.
Sadly for Samsung, the Galaxy S III is not the only device that is open to this hack, the Galaxy Beam, S Advance, Galaxy Ace and even the popular, Galaxy S II are also vulnerable. The Google branded Galaxy Nexus however is not, despite the fact it’s Samsung made.
We’ve sent off an email to Samsung to see if they’ll acknowledge this threat and if they are working on a fix.