How Samsung’s New Message Guard Protects Your Phone From Zero-Click Attacks
Hackers and intruders are always looking for new methods of attack. One such attack is known as “zero click”, which can infect your phone without any action. Samsung wants to be the face of solving this emerging problem by introducing a new security tool for its latest devices known as Samsung Message Guard .
What are zero click exploits?
Zero-click exploits are a particularly dangerous security vulnerability. While many attacks rely on you, the user, clicking on a malicious URL or downloading a file containing malware, zero-click exploits don’t require you to do anything to attack. All the attacker has to do is send you a malicious file: as soon as you receive the message on your phone, you are already infected.
How Samsung Message Guard Protects Your Phone
If Samsung Message Guard is enabled on your device, the tool looks for incoming images in your messages. When one of them arrives, it isolates that image and prevents it from interacting with the rest of the device in a so-called “sandbox”.
Message Guard then scans the message bit by bit for any traces of malicious code. If there is a problem, the image will not be able to run its code with any other part of your phone, which will prevent a zero click attack. This is a smart strategy and we hope it will ruin the day of anyone who relies on zero click to spread malware on our smartphones.
Which phones are compatible with Samsung Message Guard?
At launch, Samsung Message Guard is only available on the latest set of Galaxy devices, which includes the Galaxy S23, S23+, and S23 Ultra. Samsung plans to roll out Message Guard to other Galaxy phones and tablets later this year if the device is running One UI 5.1 .
It’s also not a trick to force you to use Samsung Messages. If you prefer the Google Messages app, keep using it as Samsung Message Guard also works with it. What’s more, Samsung plans to release an update later to enable Message Guard to work with third-party chat apps.
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