Security researchers in Israel have discovered serious vulnerabilities in the operating system used by Samsung in its smart televisions, smart watches and mobile devices, Fortune reported.
It’s possible that tens of millions of Samsung products could be at risk of being remotely take over by hackers.
Security researcher Amihai Neiderman told Motherboard that the hacking flaws are within the Tizen operating system, which runs on the company’s TVs, smart watches and even some mobile phones. The system is believed to be available on 30 million Samsung TVs alone.
Though it’s not clear if hackers have already started exploiting the vulnerabilities, Neiderman, who is head of research at Equus Software in Israel, said that many of the 40 flaws or zero-day exploits were caused by coding errors that product testing did not uncover.
“It may be the worst code I’ve ever seen,” he told Motherboard prior to his talk at Kaspersky Lab’s Security Analyst Summit. “Everything you can do wrong there, they do it. You can see that nobody with any understanding of security looked at this code or wrote it. It’s like taking an undergraduate and letting him program your software.”
The security hole, if taken advantage of by an hacker, can essentially allow someone to update the Tizen operating system with any malicious code they want.