Samsung Galaxy flagship smartphones are reportedly being targeted, attacked and hacked in South Korea, the home town of technology giant Samsung Electronics. According to a report by South Korean publication Dispatch, which many sources across the internet have claimed is a credible investigative journalism portal, observations made over the past two months have revealed that all celebrities and public figures that are being targeted in a new wave of cyber bullying, blackmail and ransomware attacks were using Samsung Galaxy flagship smartphones, but refrain from naming which specific handsets were being used.
Dispatch has also not revealed the exact identities of those that were hacked. However, the report states that hackers are targeting Samsung's cloud storage and network infrastructure, exploiting an unspecified vulnerability in it to gain access to personal content such as photos, videos and even text message transcripts. The attackers are then holding the compromised users' data for ransom, threatening to release the data in public forum if requisite payments are not made. As per GizChina, the hackers are demanding ransom of anywhere between 50 million to 1 billion Korean won (~Rs 30.7 lac to Rs 6.1 crore).
As of now, Samsung has neither confirmed and nor denied these reports. It is also not clear as to how severe is the flaw in Samsung's cloud infrastructure that is leading to such breaches, and whether this has a chance of impacting users globally as well. The pattern of hacking into users of Samsung's smartphones was seemingly observed by reporting media Dispatch for over two months, but it is not clear whether the publication reported the issue to Samsung as well, and whether this has since been patched. It is important to note that no similar reports have yet been observed regarding Samsung's Galaxy S, Note or any other smartphone lineup anywhere else in the world, and at the time of publishing, News18 could not independently verify the factual accuracy of the original report.
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