Samsung Galaxy S7 smartphones vulnerable to hacking – researchers

Hundreds of mostly African farm labourers have marched from fields in southern Italy chanting “we are not slaves, no to exploitation” in a protest against the working conditions of tomato pickers, AFP news agency reports.

The protest came after 16 migrant workers died in two road accidents within 48 hours, highlighting the plight of farm workers around the city of Foggia in the Puglia region.

Both accidents happened when lorries transporting tomatoes crashed into vans carrying farm workers returning from their day’s work.

Their pay is as low as one euro ($1.16) for picking 100kg (221lb) of tomatoes.

The workers are sometimes recruited by people linked to the mafia, and the deaths have caused much public anger, AFP reports.

Italy’s far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini visited the region on Tuesday, promising to fight the “mafia” in and around Foggia and to destroy it “street by street, town by town”, the agency reports. Samsung’s Galaxy S7 smartphones contain a microchip security flaw, uncovered earlier this year, that put tens of millions of devices at risk to hackers looking to spy on their users, researchers told Reuters.

The Galaxy 7 and other smartphones made by Samsung Electronics were previously thought to be immune to a security vulnerability known as Meltdown, which researchers said affected most of the world’s PCs, smartphones and other computing devices.

Researchers from Austria’s Graz Technical University told Reuters they have figured out a way to exploit the Meltdown vulnerability to attack Galaxy S7 handsets.

The team plans to release their findings on Wednesday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. They are looking into Meltdown’s impact on other makes and models of smartphones and expect to uncover more vulnerable devices in the near future, researcher Michael Schwarz told Reuters.

“There are potentially even more phones affected that we don’t know about yet,” he said. “There are potentially hundreds of million of phones out there that are affected by Meltdown and may not be patched because the vendors themselves do not know.”

Samsung said it created a patch to protect Galaxy S7 handsets against Meltdown that it began pushing out to affected users last month.

“Samsung takes security very seriously and our products and services are designed with security as a priority,” the company said in a statement.

A Samsung spokeswoman declined to say how many Galaxy S7s were vulnerable to Meltdown attacks.

She said there were no reported cases where Meltdown had been exploited to attack an S7 handset and that no other Samsung phones were known to be vulnerable.

Meltdown, and a second vulnerability known as Spectre, can be exploited to reveal the contents of a computer device’s central processing unit – designed to be a secure inner sanctum. Hackers can exploit those vulnerabilities by either bypassing hardware barriers or tricking applications into giving up secret information such as passwords or banking details.

There are no known cases of hackers exploiting either vulnerability in a real-world attack, but disclosure of the widespread hardware flaws has rocked the computer industry, forcing chipmakers and device manufacturers to scramble to contain the fallout.

The Galaxy S7 is currently used by some 30 million people, according to research firm Strategy Analytics. Samsung has released two new versions of its flagship Galaxy line of smartphones since the S7 debuted in 2016.