A now-patched safety flaw in Samsung Galaxy Android units was exploited as a zero-day to ship a “commercial-grade” Android adware dubbed LANDFALL in focused assaults within the Center East.
The exercise concerned the exploitation of CVE-2025-21042 (CVSS rating: 8.8), an out-of-bounds write flaw within the “libimagecodec.quram.so” element that might enable distant attackers to execute arbitrary code, based on Palo Alto Networks Unit 42. The problem was addressed by Samsung in April 2025.
“This vulnerability was actively exploited within the wild earlier than Samsung patched it in April 2025, following experiences of in-the-wild assaults,” Unit 42 mentioned. Potential targets of the exercise, tracked as CL-UNK-1054, are situated in Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Morocco primarily based on VirusTotal submission information.
The event comes as Samsung disclosed in September 2025 that one other flaw in the identical library (CVE-2025-21043, CVSS rating: 8.8) had additionally been exploited within the wild as a zero-day. There isn’t any proof of this safety flaw being weaponized within the LANDFALL marketing campaign. Samsung didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
It is assessed that the assaults concerned sending through WhatsApp malicious pictures within the type of DNG (Digital Destructive) recordsdata, with proof of LANDFALL samples going all the best way again to July 23, 2024. That is primarily based on DNG artifacts bearing names like “WhatsApp Picture 2025-02-10 at 4.54.17 PM.jpeg” and “IMG-20240723-WA0000.jpg.”
Itay Cohen, senior principal researcher at Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, instructed The Hacker Information that they haven’t noticed any important practical adjustments between the samples from July 2024 and February 2025, when the latest LANDFALL artifact was uploaded to VirusTotal.
LANDFALL, as soon as put in and executed, acts as a complete spy device, able to harvesting delicate information, together with microphone recording, location, pictures, contacts, SMS, recordsdata, and name logs.
Whereas Unit 42 mentioned the exploit chain could have concerned using a zero-click strategy to set off the exploitation of CVE-2025-21042 with out requiring any person interplay, there are at present no indications that it has occurred or there exists an unknown safety challenge in WhatsApp to assist this speculation.
The Android adware is particularly designed to focus on Samsung’s Galaxy S22, S23, and S24 collection units, in addition to Z Fold 4 and Z Flip 4, masking among the flagship units from the South Korean electronics chaebol, excluding the most recent technology.
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| Flowchart for LANDFALL adware |
It is value noting that across the similar time WhatsApp disclosed {that a} flaw in its messaging app for iOS and macOS (CVE-2025-55177, CVSS rating: 5.4) was chained together with CVE-2025-43300 (CVSS rating: 8.8), a flaw in Apple iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, to doubtlessly goal lower than 200 customers as a part of a classy marketing campaign. Apple and WhatsApp have since patched the issues.
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| Timeline for latest malicious DNG picture recordsdata and related exploit exercise |
Unit 42’s evaluation of the found DNG recordsdata present that they arrive with an embedded ZIP file appended to the tip of the file, with the exploit getting used to extract a shared object library from the archive to run the adware. Additionally current within the archive is one other shared object that is designed to control the gadget’s SELinux coverage to grant LANDFALL elevated permissions and facilitate persistence.
The shared object that masses LANDFALL additionally communicates with a command-and-control (C2) server over HTTPS to enter right into a beaconing loop and obtain unspecified next-stage payloads for subsequent execution.
“At this level, we will not share particulars in regards to the next-stage payloads delivered from the C2 server,” Cohen mentioned. “What we are able to say is that LANDFALL is a modular adware framework — the loader we analyzed is clearly designed to fetch and execute further parts from the C2 infrastructure. These later phases possible prolong its surveillance and persistence capabilities, however they weren’t recovered within the samples obtainable to us.”
It is at present not recognized who’s behind the adware or the marketing campaign. That mentioned, Unit 42 mentioned LANDFALL’s C2 infrastructure and area registration patterns dovetail with that of Stealth Falcon (aka FruityArmor), though, as of October 2025, no direct overlaps between the 2 clusters have been detected.
The findings counsel that the delivering LANDFALL is probably going a part of a broader DNG exploitation wave that additionally hit iPhone units through the aforementioned exploit chains. In addition they spotlight how refined exploits can stay accessible in public repositories for prolonged intervals of time, flying beneath the radar till they are often totally analyzed.
“We do not imagine this particular exploit continues to be getting used, since Samsung patched it in April 2025,” Cohen mentioned. “Nevertheless, associated exploit chains affecting Samsung and iOS units had been noticed as just lately as August and September, indicating that comparable campaigns remained energetic till very just lately. Some infrastructure that may be associated to LANDFALL additionally stays on-line, which may counsel ongoing or follow-on exercise by the identical operators.”
(The story was up to date after publication to make clear particulars surrounding using WhatsApp as a distribution vector for the malware and extra insights from Unit 42.)
