Samsung Galaxy S23 Comes With Message Guard to Protect Users

It used to be that you had to be stupid enough to click a patchy link to virus-infect your phone. Today, cybercriminals can hide sophisticated malware in plain-looking image files that will regally attack your phone without you having to lift a finger. The so-called “Zero click” Exploits are a whole different ball game.

Luckily, big phone companies are doing their best protect users from this type of danger. Samsung this week announced the introduction of Message Guard, a new security feature designed to protect Galaxy phones and tablets from zero-click attacks. According to Samsung, the new feature should “automatically neutralize all potential threats hiding in image files before they can damage the device”.

What Guard does is “sandbox” all pictures sent to your phone. Sandboxing is the process of virtually isolating computer files from the rest of a digital environment, allowing for safe analysis. In this case, Samsung says Guard immediately quarantines all image files sent to the device via SMS (this includes JPEGs, GIFs, PNG, ICO, BMP, WBMP, and WEBP), and then goes to work to assess whether they could be harmful or not.

“When an image file arrives via text message, the image is captured and isolated from the rest of your device,” the phone maker says press release reads. “Samsung Message Guard inspects the image file piece by piece and processes it in a controlled environment to make sure it can’t infect the rest of your device.” Background” is automated.

Currently, Message Guard is only available in the Samsung Galaxy s23 range, the Just startedbut the phone company says the feature will come to other phones and tablets later this year.

Samsung isn’t the only phone company introducing protections against zero-click attacks. Last year Apple “lockdown mode‘, its own slightly different defense package. Unlike Samsung’s sandboxing approach, Lockdown simply blocks most message attachments, including images, to prevent any possible avenue of infection.