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The Message Guard feature from Samsung can protect you from threats on your smartphone. We tell you how it works and how you can use it
How Samsung Message Guard works
The security feature can protect you from data theft on your smartphone:
- The Message Guard is designed to protect you from so-called “zero-click exploits”. This type of Trojan gets onto your smartphone without any involvement on your part. In the process, an infected image file is sent to your device as a message, which was previously able to exploit a security hole in the system to spy on it.
- This allows the attackers to tap into your credentials and gain access to your PayPal or bank account, for example, and steal your money.
- But with Samsung Message Guard, your data is safe. Because this programme always runs in the background and acts like a kind of sandbox. Every incoming message with an image file attached is checked and first opened in isolation. If it appears safe, the message is delivered. If not, the message is blocked.
- The Samsung Message Fuard can only check messages in Samsung Messenger and Google Messages. However, other popular chat services are to follow.
- The following image formats are examined by the software: JPG/JPEG, PNG, GIF, WEBP, ICO, BMP or WBMP.
Use Samsung Message Guard & compatible apps and models
You do not need to activate Samsung Message Guard. However, the security tool has a few requirements.
- Message Guard is automatically enabled on all Samsung Galaxy devices with at least OneUI 5.1.
- Only Samsung Messenger and Google Messages are supported at the moment, but more messaging services will surely be added in the future.
