Samsung is taking fair action to deal with a recently surfaced Wi-Fi security flaw dubbed FragAttacks. Security researcher Mathy Vanhoef discovered and revealed the flaw.
Vanhoef had found the KRACK Wi-Fi vulnerability about four years ago. The researcher discovered a myriad of vulnerabilities that affect several Wi-Fi devices including IoT products, TVs, and phones.
These vulnerabilities are known as FragAttacks, which is short fragmentation and aggregation attacks. They affected several products of different brands and year of release.
Millions of WiFi devices are at risk
According to Vanhoef, the aforesaid vulnerabilities are affecting all modern Wi-Fi security protocols such as WPA3. Moreover, these vulnerabilities even affect the original security protocol, WEP.
FragAttacks alludes to a group of recently discovered security flaws that have existed since 1997. Since they are included in the Wi-Fi protocols, they affect devices with Wi-Fi capabilities.
Attackers can misuse the FragAttacks vulnerabilities in two ways. Firstly, these flaws can be used to steal sensitive data if the conditions are right. Devices connected to a home network are at risk due to these flaws.
This poses a bigger risk because most smart home and IoT devices aren’t regularly updated, according to Vanhoef’s website.
The researcher points out that these smart home and IoT devices are more at risk because they usually rely on built-in security of the Wi-Fi protocols to evade malicious attacks.
Samsung is dealing with these issues since last month
The extent of this new FragAttacks vulnerability is huge. However, Samsung customers are safer as compared to the others.
The South Korean tech giant has been quietly addressing all twelve FragAttacks vulnerabilities by rolling out the April 2021 security patch, according to SamMobile. This is probably why Samsung has done a commendable job in terms of releasing the April update for several Galaxy devices.
All the FragAttacks vulnerabilities that have been discovered are addressed in he April 2021 security patch. It also includes a couple of extra fixes for vulnerabilities labeled CVE-2020-11264 and CVE-2020-11301.
They seem to be a part of the FragAttacks collection of vulnerabilities. However, Vanhoef did not mention them on his website.
Samsung has proved once again that it is on top as far as security patches and firmware updates are concerned. Since these security flaws have existed for a long time, some old devices are likely to remain vulnerable.
Vanhoef recommends a slew of cybersecurity tips in a bid to keep fraggers at bay. The researcher suggests using a strong, unique Wi-Fi password and connecting only to websites using the HTTPS encryption protocol if possible,