Here’s How Galaxy S23 Series Wards Off Zero-Click Attacks

Samsung Galaxy S23 series was recently launched as the South Korean conglomerate’s flagship smartphone lineup of the year. With Galaxy S23, Galaxy S23 Ultra, and Galaxy S23 Plus smartphones, the series has been making headlines for quite some time now. The latest development around the already launched flagship lineup from Samsung enhances its security capabilities. Samsung Galaxy S23 series has reportedly received the Samsung Message Guard feature, which aims to prevent malicious zero-click attacks through images sent to the smartphone. While the latest Samsung Galaxy S series phones have not reported of such issues yet, malicious attackers have been seen in the past carrying out such attacks.

According to a report by PhoneArena, Samsung has confirmed to introduce Smasung Message Guard to its latest Samsung Galaxy S23 series, which includes the vanilla Galaxy S23, the higher-end Galaxy S23 Plus, and the top-end Galaxy S23 Ultra smartphones. The pre-emptive security feature prevents attackers from exploiting zero-click images, which could give the attacker access and control to the user’s messages, gallery, and even extremely sensitive information like login credentials to banking applications.

However, the report mentions that Samsung emphasises on calling this a pre-emptive feature as no such zero-click exploit cases have been reported so far on its’ Galaxy smartphones.

Samsung Message Guard will utilise a sand-boxed environment to simulate receiving the image while checking whether it could contain any potentially harmful or malicious code that could be exploited by an attacker. The virtual quarantine would allow the system to detect any hazard residing in the components of the image and neutralise it to prevent serious damage to the user’s smartphone or sensitive data stored in it.

The feature comes pre-activated and hence, users would not be required to carry out any further steps in order to protect their phones from such potential zero-click exploits, added the report.

Currently, the feature is supported on Samsung Messages and Messages by Google application. However, the South Korean conglomerate is expected to update security feature to be compatible with third-party messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, and others, in the future.