Samsung freaks out smartphone owners with mysterious ‘1’ notification

Many owners of Samsung smartphones have received an odd notification from the Find My Mobile app:

Find My Mobile
1
1

What the heck could that mean?

Curious users who clicked on the notification message found that it simply disappeared, leaving them none the wiser.

Anyone else get that find my mobile push notification that just about gave me a heart attack?

Jesus christ Samsung

— Josh Broom (@BroomDoom) February 20, 2020

Got a mysterious find my mobile notification. Was scared that someone tried to track me but it seems thousands of people got this? @SamsungMobile what's happening pic.twitter.com/g2NxB1ZjCT

— Rena (@Ayano7Aishi) February 20, 2020

Could it be an hacker attempting to exploit a vulnerability? After all, we’ve seen some pretty bizarre exploits spread via smartphone messages in the past.

The truth, however, is this – no, it’s nothing malicious. It’s just a cock-up, as Samsung explained on Twitter:

“This notification was confirmed as a message sent unintentionally during internal testing and there is no effect on your device. Samsung apologises for any inconvenience this may have caused to our customers and will work to prevent similar cases from occurring in the future.”

It’s not the first time a test message has accidentally gone to the wider public, and it’s certainly not the biggest freakout that has ever occurred as a result.

Remember when the people of Hawaii were petrified to receive an alert on their smartphones telling them that North Korea had fired a ballistic missile at them?

That bogus alert happened for the same reason – someone pressed the wrong button.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.