Security researcher Nitay Artenstein who works for Exodus Intelligence has discovered a potentially extremely dangerous leak present in the wifi-chips of over one billion smartphones worldwide.

These chips, made by Broadcom and installed in all iPhones and most Android phones, could pose a high threat to users from hacking endeavors.

Artenstein discovered the leak by abusing the connection process the chip starts when the phone is establishing a connection to a familiar wifi-network. By exploiting a bug in the aforementioned process, Artenstein was also able to implement a self-written worm that could infect countless other phones without requiring that much extra effort which it normally should. The researcher claims the level of threat this leak represented was made larger by the possibility of hackers accessing the kernel of these smartphones through the discovered leak.

Luckily, smartphone users around the world can rest easy because both Apple and Google already released an update in the past month that fixed the leak from the chips present in their smartphones.