‘Landfall’ spyware abused zero-day to hack Samsung Galaxy phones

Safety researchers have found an Android adware that focused Samsung Galaxy telephones throughout an almost year-long hacking marketing campaign.

Researchers at Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 stated the adware, which they name “Landfall,” was first detected in July 2024 and relied on exploiting a safety flaw within the Galaxy cellphone software program that was unknown to Samsung on the time, a kind of vulnerability often known as a zero-day. 

Unit 42 stated the flaw could possibly be abused by sending a maliciously crafted picture to a sufferer’s cellphone, doubtless delivered by a messaging app, and that the assaults might not have required any interplay from the sufferer. 

Samsung patched the safety flaw — tracked as CVE-2025-21042 — in April 2025, however particulars of the adware marketing campaign abusing the flaw haven’t been beforehand reported.

The researchers stated it’s not recognized which surveillance vendor developed the Landfall adware, neither is it recognized what number of people have been focused as a part of the marketing campaign. However the researchers stated that the assaults doubtless focused people within the Center East.

Itay Cohen, a senior principal researcher at Unit 42, instructed TechCrunch that the hacking marketing campaign consisted of a “precision assault” on particular people and never a mass-distributed malware, which signifies that the assaults have been doubtless pushed by espionage.

Unit 42 discovered that the Landfall adware shares overlapping digital infrastructure utilized by a recognized surveillance vendor dubbed Stealth Falcon, which has been beforehand seen in adware assaults in opposition to Emirati journalists, activists, and dissidents way back to 2012. However the researchers stated that the hyperlinks with Stealth Falcon, whereas intriguing, weren’t sufficient to obviously attribute the assaults to a specific authorities buyer.

Unit 42 stated that the Landfall adware samples that they found had been uploaded to VirusTotal, a malware scanning service, from people in Morocco, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey all through 2024 and early 2025.

Turkey’s nationwide cyber readiness crew, often known as USOM, flagged one of many IP addresses that the Landfall adware related to as malicious, which Unit 42 stated helps the speculation that people in Turkey might have been focused.

Very similar to different authorities adware, Landfall is able to broad gadget surveillance, resembling accessing the sufferer’s knowledge, together with photographs, messages, contacts and name logs, in addition to the tapping of the gadget’s microphone and monitoring their exact location.

Unit 42 discovered that the adware’s supply code referenced 5 particular Galaxy telephones, together with the Galaxy S22, S23, S24, and a few Z fashions, as targets. Cohen stated that the vulnerability might have additionally been current on different Galaxy gadgets, and affected Android variations 13 by 15. 

Samsung didn’t reply to a request for remark.