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I just received a notification from Samsungs "Find My Mobile" service, without having triggered anything. The same thing happened to my work mate today morning.

android notification from Find My Mobile

As I almost never use my Samsung account, and never even configured this service, I assume one of the following:

  • Someone hijacked my Samsung account
  • Someone hijacked the Samsung system, affecting multiple user accounts
  • The responsible api call is lacking a permission check
  • Samsung itself did a test which went wrong

Does anyone know more about this?

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  • I would assume that someone managed to abuse on of the APIs provided by Samsung sending this find my mobile notification to multiple users. For doing so you don't have to hijack a complete system. May be the API of Find my mobile API allows to specify a foreign user id instead of using your id from the login system.
    – Robert
    Feb 20, 2020 at 13:49
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    the more interesting why this happen even to devices having Find My Mobile disabled, and would it be possible to erase all Samsung devices "unintentionally" same way?
    – alecxs
    Feb 21, 2020 at 0:31
  • Yes, it's rather distressing since I don't even have a Samsung account. At least it's not another Hawaiian missle test warning.
    – zero298
    Feb 21, 2020 at 2:05

1 Answer 1

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Samsung probably wanted to quickly refresh their internal user locations database ;)

https://twitter.com/SamsungHelpUK/status/1230430326687780865

@SamsungHelpUK

Recently, a notification about “Find My Mobile 1” occurred on a limited number of Galaxy devices. This was sent unintentionally during an internal test and there is no effect on your device. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused our customers. ^LF

http://www.google.com/search?tbm=nws&q=find+my+mobile

edit: against some news, this notification was not the result of a Samsung data breach.

https://www.sammobile.com/news/samsung-data-leaked-mystery-find-my-mobile-notification

Samsung has clarified that, while a data breach did happen around the same time, it's not related to the “Find my Mobile” notification. this technical error affected only Samsung's UK website and it only affected about 150 users in total.

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  • related : theverge.com/2020/2/20/21145130/…
    – Pac0
    Feb 21, 2020 at 12:09
  • Hmm? By technical error, are they referring to the breach or the accidental notification? Because my wife and I (both in the US) received the notification.. EDIT: from the article's comments, it looks like I wasn't the only one confused by the UK comment.
    – Arctiic
    Feb 29, 2020 at 8:31
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    @Arctiic the notification was sent to all (newer) samsung devices. the data breach was limited to few users in samsung shop
    – alecxs
    Feb 29, 2020 at 9:53

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