Samsung has scampered to fix a severe zero-day vulnerability, which was proactively utilized by creative attackers who aim the Android user base and the vulnerability has been obsequiously detected by the WhatsApp and the Meta security team since they discovered fingerprints of an actual live exploitation associated with the persistence of commercial spyware and involves both iPhone and Android based systems are exploited in high-profile assaults of the civil society layer of the population, journalists, and human condition activists
How Samsung discovered this severe zero-day metric with WhatsApp
The security updates of the Android devices against a vulnerability used in the wild have a patch in September 2025. The exploit bug occurred at CVE-2025-21043 (CVSS data of 8.8), where it was mentioned as an out-of-bounds write in the libimagecodec.quram.so image decoding logic, invoked by image interpreting applications on the Samsung platform. Samsung argues that remote intruders can pass arbitrary code on vulnerable computers, successfully exploiting the security flaw.
The firm has not provided the information about the bug, realized exploitation, and rather blamed the coverage by the Meta and WhatsApp security teams, which took place on August 13, 2021. The fact that the report was released together with the Samsung zero-day was a part of a core image library, and the date when the report was issued points to the fact that it might very well be utilized by hackers to attack WhatsApp customers.
As Gandhi put it, the Apple bug, which two weeks earlier WhatsApp had disclosed, was shackled to a vulnerability that the WhatsApp code has referred to as CVE-2025-55177 and had been used in the robust assault on the specific targeted users. The communication platform belonging to Meta signified that it has failed to warn less than 200 users regarding the potential of attackers to their devices at the moment.
Why is this zero-day attack so important to the users?
The Android user to the Clovis offer was not contained in the late August warning provided by WhatsApp, but was reported by the Amnesty International cybersecurity researcher, Donncha O Cearbhaill, to have affected not only iPhones but also Android users. The spyware vendors attributed the attacks to people in civil society. Indications show that the WhatsApp attack is being implemented on the iPhone and Android platforms, which also involve members of civil society.
This can be confirmed considering that even before the patch being rolled out, there were reports of the existence of exploits in the wild, indicating the high level of reporting of proper exploits, and also the high level of capability of the threat actors involved. The messaging applications have been an easy target due to commercial spyware sellers targeting them as they are making them more popular, leading to critical communications being intercepted.
Why is this happening so significantly in bringing out this issue of spyware?
The criticality of this zero-day vulnerability is that it indicates the dire need to ensure that security patches of Android devices are kept in a constant state of update. The fact that the vulnerability was actively sought out before Samsung released a patch portrays the urgency and the speed with which the attackers unite efforts to exploit any kind of vulnerability to security that has been identified recently.
The relationship that WhatsApp, Meta, Apple, and Samsung formed to reduce their cross-cutting vulnerabilities is evidence of the contribution that partnership with the industry achieves in counteracting the advancement of cybercrime. The given accident will be an excellent reminder that, however extensive and widespread popular tools may be, there is something that requires a critical security weakness that hackers are just waiting to discover.