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AirDrop and Quick Share vulnerabilities affect protocols on five billion devices as fixes begin

Feeds2.Feedburner •Mirko Zorz • June 30, 2026

Phones and laptops ship with a feature that sends files to nearby devices over the air, with no cables, accounts, or prior pairing. Apple calls its version AirDrop. Google and Samsung call theirs Quick . Both run inside privileged background services that wake when another device comes within wireless range, and both read a stack of serialized data formats sent by devices they have never met. More than five billion active devices run one of … More →

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This article is one source in a clustered incident — the cluster page carries the summary, timeline and every other outlet covering it.

Critical Vulnerabilities in AirDrop and Quick Share Expose Billions of Devices Researchers at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security have uncovered six vulnerabilities in Apple's AirDrop and Google's Quick Share protocols, affecting over five billion devices. These flaws allow attackers within 10-30 meters to crash devices or manipulate file transfers without user interaction. The vulnerabilities include three denial-of-service bugs in AirDrop, two protocol-state manipulation exploits in Quick, and a user-after-free bug potentially leading to remote code execution. The AirDrop vulnerabilities require devices to be in permissive modes, while Quick is widely used on Android and Windows. The researchers developed a custom fuzzer, AirFuzz, to identify these issues. The vulnerabilities have been responsibly disclosed, and fixes are in progress, but exposure remains significant. The findings highlight the need for better security in proximity transfer protocols. 7 sources 71

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AirDrop