Over the past few hours thousands of internet users have reported serious problems with their Blu-ray players, home theater systems and Samsung audio and sound systems. All the problems seem to have started at the same time and sometime on Friday, June 19, when the first reports began to appear on Samsung’s official support forums, as well as forums on Reddit and Twitter accounts.
Reports vary depending on the type and model of the device; however, the most frequent reports seem to be related to the company’s Blu-ray players, which go into a reboot cycle as soon as they are turned on: “Apparently Samsung collapsed all of its Blu-ray players at the same time,” a concerned Twitter user said.
Other reported issues are reverted to some strange noises in the device tray, even if the tray is empty. Other users claim that their devices shut down suddenly just a few seconds after being turned on, while others say their devices do not respond to commands sent by the remote control.
Although some users believe that this may have been caused by a poorly implemented firmware update, there is no real evidence to check this hypothesis. The cybersecurity community has tried to contact Samsung’s security teams, although so far the company has not issued any statements.
While many devices are affected by this problem, it should be noted that most of the affected models are already in the final stretch of their lifespan, not to mention that Samsung does not usually send general firmware updates for all of their devices at once.
Experts believe that the simplest investigation is that these problems were generated by an SSL certificate that has already expired; this certificate would have been linked to Samsung servers using HTTPS.
Expired certificates are one of the most common causes of service disruptions of this kind, and have already affected other major companies before. Among the large companies that have suffered these incidents are Facebook, Microsoft, Roku, Ericsson, Mozilla, among others.
He is a cyber security and malware researcher. He studied Computer Science and started working as a cyber security analyst in 2006. He is actively working as an cyber security investigator. He also worked for different security companies. His everyday job includes researching about new cyber security incidents. Also he has deep level of knowledge in enterprise security implementation.