Hackers Expose 11 Major Security Flaws In Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge

Posted by Soulskill

MojoKid writes:  

Going on a bug hunt might not sound like the most exciting thing in the world, but for Project Zero, the name for a team of security analysts tasked by Google with finding zero-day exploits, a good old fashioned bug hunt is both exhilarating and productive. 

As a result of Project Zero's efforts to root out security flaws in Samsung's Galaxy S6 Edge device (and by association, likely the entire Galaxy S6 line), owners are now more secure. 

The team gave themselves a week to root out vulnerabilities, and to keep everyone sharp, the researchers made a contest out of it pitting the North American and European participants against each other.  

Their efforts resulted in the discovery of 11 vulnerabilities, the "most interesting" of which was CVE-2015-7888. It's a directory traversal bug that allows a file to be written as a system. Project Zero said it was trivially exploitable, though it's also one of several that Samsung has since fixed.