Samsung Galaxy's Source Code Has Been Stolen By Hackers, Samsung Said

08/03/2022

Samsung Galaxy is Samsung's series of computing and mobile computing for its consumer devices, most famously used to brand the company's high-end devices.

These devices include Galaxy S series of smartphones, the Samsung Galaxy Tab series of tablets, the Samsung Galaxy Note series of tablets and phablets with the added functionality of a stylus, the foldable Samsung Galaxy Z series, and smartwatches including the first version of the Samsung Galaxy Gear, with later versions dropping the Galaxy branding, until the release of the Samsung Galaxy Watch in 2018.

With the many devices that use the brand name, it certainly attracted hackers.

And this time, hackers managed to steal Samsung Galaxy's source code, as confirmed by the South Korean company.

The hacking group that claimed responsibility for the attack, is Lapsus$, the same hacker that hacked Nvidia and leaked the chipmaker's employee credentials and proprietary information onto the internet.

Read: Nvidia Suffers From Cyberattack, Crippling Its Internal Systems

The Samsung Galaxy Ultra
The Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra. (Credit: Samsung)

This time, Lapsus$ purportedly posted a 190GB torrent file to its Telegram channel, claiming that it contains algorithms for biometric login authentication and bootloader.

The hacker group did this while teasing about releasing Samsung data with a snapshot of C/C++ directives in Samsung software.

This kind of information can cause havoc since the code within could be used to bypass some of Samsung Galaxy devices' operating system controls.

Samsung that disclosed the breach soon after realizing it said that personal data belonging to employees and customers had not been compromised.

"There was a security breach relating to certain internal company data," said Samsung.

"According to our initial analysis, the breach involves some source code relating to the operation of Galaxy devices but does not include the personal information of our consumers or employees."

Regardless, Samsung said that is taking actions to prevent any further security issues, and to also ensure that the hackers won't impact its business or customers.

The breach happened shortly after reports emerged claiming that Samsung deliberately limits the performance of around 10,000 apps, including Instagram and TikTok.

According to the company, its “Game Optimizing Service” was designed to balance performance and cooling, but many people considered this as performance throttling.

This is because Game Optimizing Service that was first introduced alongside the Galaxy S22 series, throttled the performance of its chips to as low as Galaxy S10 series, which were first launched way back in 2019.

The public also slammed the South Korean company for selectively excluding benchmarking apps in the Game Optimizing Service.

Responding to the backlash, Samsung said that a planned software update would allow users to control the performance of these apps, but not before the popular benchmarking app Geekbench delisted the Galaxy S10, S20, S21, and S22 smartphones from its database.