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Crashing A Nokia Phone Via SMS

Posted by Hemos on from the doesn't-matter-to-me dept.

Atryn writes "An article at the Register reports that a recent Black Hat conference presenter demonstrated how to crash Nokia cell phones using malformed headers in SMS messaging protocols. Though the SIM card can be recovered by moving to a new phone, this is perhaps an interesting preview of security issues as data goes wireless." Of course, when you live in the US, where your wireless services are about eight years behind the curve, this is less of an issue. *grin*

9 of 197 comments (clear)

  1. Quick! Update the phones by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    with a lameness filter! That should fix the problem.

  2. Re:Old news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Apparently /. doesn't like posted up to date news. This story was posted on the register 2 days ago. I just tried to submit a story about exodus being bought. It got rejected, but chances are, it will be posted in a day or two.

  3. Re:Quick! Update the phones by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Hmm... An SMS message compression filter. That'd work...

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  4. Re:Black hats by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    No.


    Rate my troll at : Am I IP banned or Not?

  5. New phone by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Is this the new Nokia or Microsoft offering?

  6. WARNING: GOATSE.CX LINK!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    The parent post is a troll, for God's sake, don't click that link!

  7. Re:Black hats by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Just as its the woman's fault for being raped?

  8. normally I don't react like this... by sluggie · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    2001-11-29 15:40:51 simple SMS kills cell phones (articles,security) (rejected)

    sorry, I know that someone is going to mod me down for this... BUT THAT IS NOT FAIR!!!

    If someone with the same expierence reads this please reply or tell me about your unfair rejection by email me(at)sluggie.org.

    Thanks!
    sluggie out.

  9. Been there, done that... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    A year back, I wrote a piece of software (in Perl, no less!) to proxy all access to their SMSC and only let the SMS:s in GSM03.38 standard format pass through (and do some accounting and billing while at it).

    It was so fucking easy. They had this piece of shit Windows executable doing roughtly the same job before, for which they had no source and which crashed at least twice a night, forcing someone to hold it by its hand. (Meanwhile blocking a lot of the operators' SMS traffic.)

    Writing the fucking Perl program took me all of three days or so and cost the client about one quarter of what they had paid for the POS Windows executable. I provided the client with the whole source code tree and they are AFAIK using the darn thing to this very day. Interpreting the friggin' billing codes was probably the most difficult part.

    Ain't I great? ;)