There was mighty uproar yesterday about a dirty USSD hack that enabled links with a simple USSD code wipe the entire phone back to factory reset. It was widely reported to have affected all the major Samsung devices that were running the company’s custom skin called TouchWiz. But the good news is, the exploit has been immediately patched by Samsung, with an OTA update for its recently released, and massively successful Galaxy S3.
Slashgear reports that Samsung immediately worked on testing the exploit and found that it appears to be because of a certain firmware version the phone was running. That exploit has now been rectified by Samsung, with an OTA update.
Here is the official statement from Samsung –
“We would like to assure our customers that the recent security issue concerning the GALAXY S III has already been resolved through a software update. We recommend all GALAXY S III customers to download the latest software update, which can be done quickly and easily via the Over-The-Air (OTA) service.”
It is not clear whether all the TouchWiz devices have been patched, as this issue is widespread, covering almost all TW devices. While we wait for an update from Samsung regarding this, the S3 users can feel safe and update their phones to steer clear of this scary hack.
Another recommendation to all users is to use anything other than the stock browser to avoid this USSD hack.
via Slashgear