Samsung updates four-year-old, unsupported Galaxy S7 series to fix critical vulnerability

Samsung updated its official software support page to remove the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge from devices that receive security updates from the company.

This marked the end of four years of software support following the duo’s launch in February 2016. Undoubtedly, owners of these devices will agree that it has been an impressive run of software updates.

Whereas Google and OnePlus provide three years of OS updates, Samsung phones get only two OS updates. On the brighter side, Samsung goes on to provide security updates for up to four years, but only for its flagship phones.

Furthermore, even with support coming to an end, Samsung is likely to roll out new software updates to these devices in the event that critical security vulnerabilities are unearthed, you know, just like it’s happening at the moment with respect to the S7 and S7 Edge.

According to reports surfacing from Korea, the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge are receiving a new software update. Apparently, the update doesn’t improve on the current security patch level, but it addresses a critical vulnerability related to SVE-2020-16747.

The same build ETD2 that brought April 2020 security patch on the Korean variant keeps its place, which means the said fix is being applied on the same firmware.

For S7 / S7 Edge devices, the patch related to SVE-2020-16747 was applied to the version (ETD2) released on May 6th. Please update and use the latest version…The S7 / S7 Edge terminal ETD2 version has a security patch level of April 1, but the patch related to SVE-2020-16747 is the applied version.
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For the uninitiated, the SVE-2020-16747 vulnerability was highlighted by Samsung earlier this month. The company revealed that it’s related to the memory corruption in Quram library with decoding qmg in Samsung devices running Android 10, Pie, and Oreo.

If exploited, this security hole may allow attackers to “arbitrary memory write with a well-crafted malicious image to perform a possible remote code execution.”

All Samsung Android devices running the May 2020 security patch should be fine. But since the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge are not planned to receive the May patch, the only way to fix this issue was through the incoming minor update.

The update is confirmed in Korea, but it shouldn’t stop there. However, it could take weeks to arrive in all markets outside of Korea. We will let you know about it.

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