MediaTek's Security Nightmare: How a Nothing Phone Was Hacked in 45 Seconds (Except It Wasn't)

MediaTek's Security Nightmare: How a Nothing Phone Was Hacked in 45 Seconds (Except It Wasn't) Sometime in late 2021, a story started bouncing around tech forums: a Nothing Phone was hacked in 45 seconds. Eavesdropping vulnerability. Terrifying chipset flaw. It had all the ingredients for virality — a trendy phone brand, a dramatic timeline, a threat that feels personal. One problem. It's wrong. The real story is actually scarier than the myth. Four vulnerabilities in MediaTek's Dimensity chipsets, discovered by Check Point Research, could have allowed any unprivileged Android app to silently listen to your conversations. The Nothing Phone was never part of it. But the hundreds of millions of devices that were affected? That's what people should have been paying attention to. What Check Point Actually Found In 2021, Check Point Research identified four vulnerabilities in MediaTek's Dimensity system-on-chips. Three were assigned CVEs related to the audio Digital Signal Processor: CVE-20