Samsung Magician Software updated after ‘high severity’ security vulnerability found

Samsung has issued an update to its Magician Software for Windows after a “high severity” vulnerability was found (h/t ComputerBase). The Samsung Magician Software is the firm’s feature-packed storage management utility, but version 8.0.0 is now known to be affected by CVE-2024-23769. Samsung released version 8.0.1 of this utility for PC users, fixing the vulnerability.

The vulnerability with identifier CVE-2024-23769 has a CVE score of 7.3 and is thus classified as a high-severity security issue. According to Samsung, the vulnerability was first reported back on October 30 last year, and it credits Masahiro Iida for reporting the issue.

In typical technical terms, Samsung and NIST describe the vulnerability as allowing “improper privilege control for the named pipe in Samsung Magician PC Software 8.0.0 (for Windows) allows a local attacker to read privileged data.”

What the above means is that an attacker could access the information of a user with higher-level privileges when using a Windows system running Samsung’s software. For example, a guest user may be able to access an admin user’s files. To exploit the vulnerability, the attacker would need local access to the machine with Samsung Magician Software 8.0.0 installed.

If you have a Samsung SSD, thumb drive, or memory card and use the Windows version of Magician Software, you can head to the downloads page to snag this updated version 8.0.1 release. Android and macOS users are still okay with version 8.0.0, it seems. Furthermore, we don’t know of any other changes delivered to version 8.0.1 for Windows, as there are no release notes for this particular point upgrade (at the time of writing). The newest Windows software installer is a 186MB download.

Samsung SSDs rank highly in our extensively researched and frequently updated Best SSDs 2024: From Budget SATA to Blazing-Fast NVMe feature. In fact, the Samsung 990 Pro, which we reviewed in October 2022, earns the enviable position of the best overall and best M.2 pick from the mass of SSD storage options currently available. It is not to be confused with the similarly named Samsung 990 EVO SSD, which only earned three stars in our review earlier this month.