Samsung has released a software update for its flagship devices. The company is calling it a “maintenance release” but for all intents and purposes it’s a security patch, which addresses a number of critical and high severity issues.
Samsung has released a software update for its flagship devices. The company is calling it a “maintenance release” but for all intents and purposes it’s a security patch, which addresses a number of critical and high severity issues.
According to Samsung, the patch is now rolling out to “major flagship models” so users should get an OTA update notification soon. In case you want to speed the process up, the patch is available for some devices via the Smart Switch desktop app.
The company isn’t giving us a full log with the fixes that are contained in this patch, because some vulnerabilities haven’t been made public yet. However, we do know that this patch contains all the security fixes from Google’s Android July patch, as well as a couple of extra fixes from Samsung itself.
The more important out of those two is one related to the Samsung Professional Audio SDK. The software contained a bug that would allow a malicious application to access or modify values in shared memory, leaving the device wide open to malicious code execution. Meanwhile, Google’s July update patches 8 “Critical” and 15 “High” severity issues, but this release hasn't been published to other devices yet; though it's expected to launch very soon.
With Android being used by over a billion devices worldwide, and new vulnerabilities being discovered every day, these patches from Google and manufacturers become critical to keeping your device secure, so go ahead and update as soon as you can.