Samsung didn’t renew its domain ssuggest.com on time. The domain was used to control the app called S Suggest, which was installed by default on Samsung phones before 2014. It served as a recommendation service to advice users on what apps they might like.
In 2014 Samsung discontinued the app and now the domain registration has expired. The company, it seems, simply forgot to renew it. As a result, ssuggest.com became available and could have been registered by anyone. Fortunately, the first one to discover the problem was the researcher at Anubis Labs João Gouveia. He registered the domain on his name. If hackers had been quicker, then the problem would have been much more serious. In 24 hours Gouveia recorded over 600 million connections from over 2 million unique devices.
Samsung representatives announced that the expired domain posed no threat to users; however, several researchers at the same time, including João Gouveia, strongly disagreed with this statement and heavily criticized the company. According to them, S Suggest app on older Samsung phones has a lot of permissions. Therefore, hackers after taking control over the domain could have used it to infect millions of devices with malware. Gouveia said that he is determined to give the domain back to Samsung and he hopes the company won't “lose it again”.
