Security Bug Can Wipe Out Your Android Phone By Visiting a Web Page

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Beware, Samsung customers! If you have a Samsung Android-based phone running their TouchWiz user interface, your telephone can be wiped out by going to any web page that contains the code "tel:*2767*3855%23" in an HTML frame.

Important update: It's not only Samsung with TouchWiz. Apparently it's happening with other Android phones too.

The vulnerability has been confirmed on the Samsung Galaxy II and AT&T's Samsung Galaxy S III, but it's probably common to any Samsung Android phone running the TouchWiz UI.

Here's how it works: the HTML frame loads a tel: URL. This url tells the telephone that its content is a clickable telephone number. However, instead of a phone number, the URL contains a special USSD code that tells the phone to wipe out itself. USSD means Unstructured Supplementary Service Data, special number sequences used by phone carriers to execute instructions in your phone.

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