- A mysterious company called Numero LLC takes control of some Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra units after a factory reset
- This gives them full control of the phone and appears to prevent users from finishing the setup process.
- It’s unclear how this happened, and Samsung is reportedly not doing much to help affected users.
Bugs and hacking attempts are common dangers when owning a smartphone, but a rather more unusual danger is currently affecting some Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra units.
Android Authority has found several reports of Galaxy S22 Ultra users losing access to their phone after a factory reset, with a message appearing saying “this Galaxy S22 Ultra is not private” and then detailing that it is instead managed by an unknown organization called Numero LLC.
Not only is the name of the company unknown, but these are also supposedly personal phones that were not provided through any organization.
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Being run by Numero LLC means that this mysterious company can monitor and control the settings and data on the phone, so it’s a major security issue, but it seems that most affected users were unable to continue with the settings after this screen appeared anyway, leaving their phones essentially locked.
A strange situation
It’s not entirely clear what’s going on here: Samsung offers a tool called Knox Mobile Enrollment, which allows businesses to automatically configure company phones, so it seems these devices have somehow been subjected to that by Numero LLC, but the question is how, since they’re not corporate phones.
Android Authority theorizes that a compromised reseller account is to blame, or alternatively, that an unauthorized user could have exploited a vulnerability in Knox to alter enterprise management settings. But that second theory would have required physical access to the phones, which seems less likely.
In any case, so far people posting about this issue haven’t had much luck getting it fixed, and Samsung support directs them to the Knox technical teams, who then send them back to Samsung support.
Currently, this doesn’t seem to be a widespread issue, but it’s an important one for those affected, so we hope Samsung fixes it soon; We’ve reached out to Samsung for comment and will update this article if we hear back.
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