Gather a group of experienced hackers and give them a week to crack the security of a popular Android phone. What do you get? Apparently, a lot of serious security flaws.

Project Zero, Google's team of expert security researchers, has done exactly that with Samsung's Galaxy S6 Edge, devoting a week to find as many serious security holes as they can. As a result, 11 "high-impact security issues" were discovered, including one that lets an attacker write a file to the victim's system without permission.

To find the holes, Project Zero divided into two teams — the North American and the European one — and focused on finding ways to either gain access to the phone's contacts, photos and messages remotely or through an app installed from Google Play which has no permissions to do so. Finally, the researchers tried to make their unauthorized code "stick" to the phone even if it was wiped.

Most of the holes stem from the device's drivers and image processing; according to Project Zero researcher Natalie Silvanovich, these were found "very quickly." She also notes that some of the problems were "trivial to exploit," making them very dangerous as a malicious hacker can easily identify and abuse them.

The team reported its findings to Samsung, which had already patched eight out of 11 of the flaws. The three unpatched issues, which are not as severe as the rest, are due to be fixed in November.

While most of these security holes were promptly fixed by Samsung, it's still worrisome that a dedicated team can find so many bugs in such a short timespan. On the other hand, Silvanovich said Samsung's quickness in resolving most of them was promising.

In August, Samsung and Google announced they would issue updates to their devices more frequently to address security issues, with Google pushing updates to its Nexus range of phones and tablets on a weekly basis, and Samsung updating its Galaxy devices each month. The news came shortly after a texting security flaw was discovered in Android software, potentially affecting nearly a billion Android devices.