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Galaxy S III bug bypasses lockscreen, allowing access to all personal data

Galaxy S III bug bypasses lockscreen, allowing access to all personal data

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Samsung Galaxy S III pebble blue (STOCK)
Samsung Galaxy S III pebble blue (STOCK)

The lockscreen on your phone may not be doing a good job of keeping intruders out. A new bug has been found on the Galaxy S III that can let users bypass the lockscreen and access all phone functions, and we've just confirmed its efficacy on a Sprint version of the device running Android 4.1.1. To get in, one need only click the emergency call button followed by "emergency contacts." Once there, if one clicks the physical home button followed quickly by the power button, the lockscreen will disappear when you wake the phone again. It requires a bit of timing, but we were able to successfully reproduce the bug, which was first discovered by Sean McMillan, without much difficulty. After bypassing the lockscreen using the bug, it remained disabled until the phone was rebooted. The security offered by lockscreens has been challenged before, with users finding bugs in the systems like one recently found in iOS 6.1 that also leveraged the emergency dialer. We have reached out to Samsung for comment.