Comment Re:Root (Score 1) 153
Who said anything about rushing ? That specific problem has been known for a long time, and most affected devices have received several updates since then. The fix is literally a one-liner in the kernel source, disabling "secure erase". When a user "resets to factory settings" (e.g. wipe all user data) the device performs an erase command. Somewhere in Android 3.x or 4.0 Google changed the default behavior from normal erase to a secure erase. The eMMC chips Samsung used were never properly tested for this, and due to a bug in the firmware of said eMMC chips, the flash memory would be corrupted during a secure erase, rendering the device completely unusable.
It's pretty much a jackpot affair, you hit the factory reset button, x% chance you end up with a full brick. Custom firmware users were much more likely to run into this because often a custom firmware would perform a factory reset upon installation - and a normal user would rarely use this function. But you did not need to run any custom software for this - it can happen on a fully original device without any modifications or even apps installed.
A few months ago, Samsung finally issued a fix - but this fix disabled secure erase being triggered by the format command itself, instead of disabling secure erase in the actual kernel. As a result, custom firmware users would still brick left and right, due to using Google-private update binaries that did not have this call disabled. They put a band-aid on the issue instead of actually fixing it (a one-liner to disable "secure erase" at kernel level (because it never actually works correctly) and revert to "normal erase" always).
Now, I have discussed these issues in person with high-level Samsung engineers, and in their opinion, how they fixed it is correct - even though an exploit like the one presented in this article allows a malicious attacker to hard-brick your device at will, thanks to this eMMC bug. Incidentally, that is exactly what I myself, as well as a number of other developers from the enthusiast community, have kept telling Samsung: with the current solution, all you need is an exploit and a viral app, and you could well end up with millions of hard-bricks.
Note that Samsung does usually warranty on a full hard-brick, so it doesn't have to be a real problem for the end-user, but if this got out of hand, it could easily cost Samsung millions and millions of dollars in repair costs. Just because it hasn't happened yet and it really is not that likely it will occur, it is certainly possible.