TECH: Samsung confirms hackers stole Galaxy source code and compromised its systems.

Sam­sung con­firmed on Mon­day that some of its data had been stolen in a cyber­at­tack first report­ed over the week­end. In a state­ment to Bloomberg, the Kore­an elec­tron­ics giant revealed that a secu­ri­ty breach saw “source code relat­ed to the oper­a­tion of Galaxy devices” tak­en but that cus­tomer and employ­ee cre­den­tials were not affected.

Although Sam­sung has not revealed the actors behind the com­pro­mise, the South Amer­i­can hack­ing group Lap­sus$ has claimed respon­si­bil­i­ty. The organ­i­sa­tion shared a 190GB tor­rent file that report­ed­ly includes the boot­loader source code for all recent Sam­sung devices, as well as code relat­ed to bio­met­ric authen­ti­ca­tion and on-device encryp­tion for Galaxy phones and tablets. The attack­ers may also have gained access to con­fi­den­tial data relat­ed to Qualcomm.

The admis­sion comes less than a week after the same group said it obtained about 1TB of data, includ­ing schemat­ics and source code, from chip giant NVIDIA. The com­pa­ny said it became aware of the attack on 23 Feb­ru­ary, after which Lap­sus $ had demand­ed a ran­som paid in cryp­to-cur­ren­cy to pre­vent NVIDI­A’s files from becom­ing pub­lic. When NVIDIA failed to respond, the source code for the com­pa­ny’s DLSS tech­nol­o­gy and infor­ma­tion about as many as six unan­nounced graph­ics cards were shared online.

“At this time, we do not antic­i­pate any impact to our busi­ness or our cus­tomers. We have put mea­sures in place to pre­vent fur­ther inci­dents of this type and will con­tin­ue to serve our cus­tomers with­out inter­rup­tion,” Sam­sung lat­er con­firmed in its state­ment. It is not known if Lap­sus $ has issued the same cryp­to-cur­ren­cy requests to Sam­sung, but we have con­tact­ed the com­pa­ny for clarification.