Hackers participating in the notorious Pwn2Own hacking event in Toronto, Canada were able to find several critical zero-day flaws while attempting to hack a Galaxy S22 phone.
During the famous Pwn2Own Toronto 2022 event, the Galaxy S22 was manhandled by different hackers. As a reminder, Pwn2Own is a hacking competition organized each year by the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), which gives hackers and security researchers the opportunity to demonstrate their skills while discovering zero-day vulnerabilities.
The various hackers have brought to light critical “zero-day” flaws in routers, printers, smart speakers and NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices from HP, NETGEAR, Synology, Sonos, TP-Link , Canon, Lexmark and Western Digital. However, the vulnerabilities the most impressive would have been found in Samsung’s latest high-end smartphone, the Galaxy S22.
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The Galaxy S22 hacked in record time
On the first day of Pwn2Own Toronto, the STAR Labs team and a contestant known as Chim demonstrates two critical flaws in the Galaxy S22, which allowed hackers to access the entire smartphone. The smartphone was again hacked during the second day by a team named Pentest Limited.
On day three, contestants also managed to hack the Samsung Galaxy S22 for the fourth time since the competition began, and this time they did it in just 55 seconds. Security researchers from Pentest Limited presented a demonstration of a zero-day vulnerability for the Galaxy S22, which uses an “Improper Input Validation” attack to access the device in less than a minute.
Thanks to their find, the security researchers received five points and won a $25,000 prize. In all four cases, according to the contest rules, the devices were running the latest version of the Android operating system and all available updates were installed.
All the hackers present at the event obviously have a very high level of hacking. However, a hack in less than a minute demonstrates that the smartphone is not a champion of security. We therefore obviously recommend that you always install the latest security updates on your smartphones.