Samsung is gearing up to roll out the One UI 8 to all its smartphones and tablets, but depending on which model and region, the Android 16 update may take months to arrive on your Galaxy phone. For now, though, your Samsung phone needs immediate attention to stay protected from malicious actors.
Samsung has issued a security update that you need to download as soon as possible, as it comes with a fix for a major vulnerability that hackers can exploit to steal your private information (via PC Mag). This impacts many Samsung users, as the vulnerability exists in Galaxy users running Android 13 and newer.
You need to update your Samsung phone right now
Samsung Galaxy devices running Android 13 and older have a bug, tracked as SVE-2025-1702 (CVE-2025-21043), in their image processing library (libimagecodec.quram.so), which hackers can exploit to execute arbitrary codes to gain access to your device.
This will allow bad actors to install spyware on the phone, and you won’t be able to spot it unless you look closely for signs of infection. However, in what may be seen as some kind of relief to Samsung users, there is no evidence to suggest that hackers exploited the bug to steal users’ information.
Samsung has marked the severity of this bug as “Critical,” which means the risk level is very high. So, your Galaxy handset continues to be in that risk-prone zone if you don’t install the latest security update from Samsung. The latest security update is live, so download it as soon as possible.
To update your Samsung Galaxy phone and install the latest security update, go to Settings and then scroll down and tap Software update, then tap Download and install.
This bug impacts not only Galaxy handsets but also iPhone devices, but unlike Samsung, Apple fixed it last month with the release of the iOS 18.6.2 update. Meta first discovered the issue and reported it to Samsung and Apple in August, so clearly, iPhone models got the protection earlier than Galaxy handsets.
