Interesting! To say the least. Reprinted from
Post# of 6614
Reprinted from the market.ticker.org
There's Nothing DIRTY On Your Phone, Right?
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Oops....
KOREAN BEHEMOTH OF MOBILE Samsung is reportedly rushing to fix a bug in its messaging service which is causing photos to be sent without the user asking.
The Samsung Galaxy S9, Galaxy S9+ and Note 8 have all shown evidence of the glitch, which is causing the Samsung Messages app to send photos - sometimes one, sometimes the entire ruddy gallery - on, sometimes before you've even noticed it's happening.
Here's the really scary bit - you might not even know it has happened, unless the recipient is honest about it with you, and given some of the stuff you store of your smartphone (we all know, we are everywhere), that could lead to some slightly, erm, awkward conversations.
Don't worry, there's nothing on your device you care about -- right?
Like.... nude pictures of your girl/boyfriend/whatever?
Or.... even worse?
That's almost-certainly not a carrier problem by the way. Indeed, the likely culprit is a programming problem, and the more-malicious (and much darker) possibility is that it's due to an "intent" action being exposed that shouldn't be coupled with someone who knows about it.
For the uninitiated you can pass data between parts of an app this way. You're not supposed to do it via open (e.g. not process-local) broadcasts, at least not without very good attention to security (and there's no reason to do it anyway within an app because using a system-wide facility makes the OS do a lot more work than it really needs to.)
But if Samsung is trying to pass this capability between apps they provide then it gets dicier indeed, especially if the issue isn't that they screwed up directly but rather that they left the door open and someone knows about it.
Why's that really bad? Because it would allow that "someone" to not only trigger it but, potentially, choose where they go too.
Surprise!
PS: Don't expect any level of detailed disclosure on this when it gets fixed -- especially if it's the latter problem.....