There was a caveat to the hack , however—the hijack involved older models of Samsung TVs and required the CIA have physical access to a TV to install the malware via a USB stick . But the window to this sort of hijacking is far wider than originally thought because a researcher in Israel has uncovered Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability 40 unknown vulnerabilities , or zero-days , that would allow someone to remotely hack millions of newer Samsung smart TVs , smart watches , and mobile phones already on the market , as well as ones slated for future release , without needing physical access to them . The security holes are in Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability an open-source operating system called Tizen that Samsung has been rolling out in its devices over the last few years . It already has Tizen running on some 30 million smart TVs , as well as Samsung Gear smartwatches and in some Samsung phones in a limited number of countries like Russia , India and Bangladesh—the company plans to have 10 million Tizen phones in the market this year . Samsung also announced earlier this year that Tizen would be the operating system on its new line of smart washing machines and refrigerators too . But the operating system is riddled Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability with serious security vulnerabilities that make it easy for a hacker to take control of Tizen-powered devices , according to Israeli researcher Amihai Neiderman . A Samsung Z1 with the Tizen operating system on display at the Mobile World Congress 2015 in Barcelona , Spain . But one security hole Neiderman uncovered Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability was particularly critical . It involves Samsung 's TizenStore app—Samsung 's version of Google Play Store—which delivers apps and software updates to Tizen devices . Neiderman says Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability a flaw in its design allowed him to hijack the software to deliver malicious code to his Samsung TV . Because the TizenStore software operates with the highest privileges you can get on a device , it 's the Holy Grail for a hacker who can abuse it . `` You can update a Tizen system with any malicious code you want , '' he says . Although TizenStore does use authentication to make sure only authorized Samsung software gets installed on a device , Neiderman found Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability a heap-overflow vulnerability that gave him control before that authentication function kicked in . Although researchers have uncovered Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability problems with other Samsung devices in the past , Tizen has escaped extensive scrutiny from the security community , probably because it 's not widely used on phones yet . It did n't take long for Neiderman to notice Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability how bad the Tizen code was on his TV , which caused him to purchase a few Tizen phones to see what he could do with them as well . He says much of the Tizen code base is old and borrows from previous Samsung coding projects , including Bada , a previous mobile phone operating system that Samsung discontinued . `` You can see that they took all this code and tried to push it into Tizen , '' Neiderman says . But most of the vulnerabilities he found Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability were actually in new code written specifically for Tizen within the last two years . Many of them are the kind of mistakes programmers were making twenty years ago , indicating that Samsung lacks basic code development and review practices to prevent and catch such flaws . But there 's a basic flaw in it whereby it fails to check if there is enough space to write the data , which can create a buffer overrun condition that attackers can exploit . A buffer overrun occurs when the space to which data is being written is too small for the data , causing the data to write to adjacent areas of memory . A Tizen stand at the at the Mobile World Congress 2015 in Barcelona , Spain . They use it on some data transmissions but not others , and usually not on ones that need it most . `` They made a lot of wrong assumptions about where they needed encryption , '' he says , noting that `` it 's extra work to move between secure connections and unsecure connections . '' This indicates that they did n't do it inadvertently but were making conscious decisions not to use SSL in those places , he says . Neiderman contacted Samsung months ago to report Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability the problems he found Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability but got only an automated email in response .

Samsung ’ s televisions and wearables reportedly have Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability serious vulnerabilities that could allow malicious hackers to remotely take control of them . Security researchers in Israel have uncovered Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability 40 previously undiscovered vulnerabilities in the operating system running in Samsung ’ s line of smart televisions , smartwatches , and even mobile phones , which could give hackers easy access to the devices , Motherboard is reporting Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability after discussing the findings Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability with the researchers . Tens of millions of electronics could be at risk , security researcher Amihai Neiderman told Motherboard . The security flaws are living inside Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability Tizen , an operating system Samsung ( SSNLF ) has been developing over the last several years that runs on the company ’ s televisions , smartwatches , and some low-powered mobile devices . Hackers with knowledge of the vulnerabilities can be half a world away but connect over the Internet to a Samsung television or wearable , and assume complete control over the device . Neiderman didn ’ t say if hackers have been exploiting some of the flaws built into Tizen , and he has only been analyzing the software for the past eight months . He believes that many of the 40 flaws—called zero day exploits because there are no fixes and hackers could take advantage of them right now—were caused by Samsung coding errors that were never discovered Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability in product testing

Researchers from several German universities have checked the PHP codebases of over 64,000 projects on GitHub , and found Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability 117 vulnerabilities that they believe have been introduced through the use of code from popular but insufficiently reviewed tutorials . The researchers identified popular tutorials by inputing search terms such as “ mysql tutorial ” , “ php search form ” , “ javascript echo user input ” , etc . into Google Search . The first five results for each query were then manually reviewed and evaluated for SQLi and XSS vulnerabilities by following OWASP ’ s guidelines ( Reviewing Code for SQL Injection , Cross Site Scripting Prevention Cheat Sheat ) . This resulted in the discovery Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability of 9 tutorials containing vulnerable code ( 6 with SQLi , 3 with XSS ) . Based on these , they created two types of queries that they used against the aforementioned data set obtained from GitHub . “ We use strict queries to identify known vulnerable patterns in web applications , and normal queries to identify code analogues of tutorial code , ” they explained . The results were , finally , manually reviewed by the researchers . “ Thanks to our framework , we have uncovered Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability over 100 vulnerabilities in web application code that bear a strong resemblance to vulnerable code patterns found Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability in popular tutorials . More alarmingly , we have confirmed Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability that 8 instances of a SQLi vulnerability present in Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability different web applications are an outcome of code copied from a single vulnerable tutorial , ” they noted . “ Our results indicate Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability that there is a substantial , if not causal , link between insecure tutorials and web application vulnerabilities. ” “ [ Our findings ] suggest that there is a pressing need for code audit of widely consumed tutorials , perhaps with as much rigor as for production code , ” they pointed out . In their research , they evaluated only PHP application code , but their approach can be easily used to evaluate codebases in other programming languages , especially because they have made available their crawler ( GithubSpider ) and code analogue detector ( CADetector ) tools . Unfortunately , such a search can be easily replicated – “ even with limited resources such as a standard PC and a broadband DSL connection ” – by individuals or groups intent of discovering Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability vulnerabilities in software for future exploitation .