The Samsung Galaxy S7 has a serious security flaw, according to researchers from Austria's Graz Technical University. A microchip security issue leaves the S7 open to Meltdown attacks. Meltdown takes advantage of a CPU tool called speculative execution, which allows processors to predict where instructions will travel. Hackers could use certain techniques to manipulate speculative execution in order to access privileged memory, such as that of the kernel. Meltdown and a similar vulnerability called Spectre were discovered to impact devices from a wide range of manufacturers late last year and early this year. "There are potentially hundreds of million of phones out there that are affected by Meltdown and may not be patched because the vendors themselves do not know," said the researchers. They plan to look at devices from other phone makers to see if other models are impacted by the flaw. Samsung claims to have plugged the Meltdown security hole in patches issued in January and again in July. "Samsung takes security very seriously and our products and services are designed with security as a priority," said the company. There are no known cases of Meltdown being used to attack the Galaxy S7. The Galaxy S7 was first released in 2016 and is used by about 30 million people, according to Strategy Analytics.