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Jamming Cellphones with Text Messages
Steve writes "Some Penn State professors and students have published a way to jam cellular voice service with simple text messages. From the article: 'Because text messages are transmitted on the same signal that is used to set up voice calls, just 165 messages a second is enough to disrupt all cellphones in Manhattan.' Cellular providers, of course, fired back, one stating that it 'constantly and aggressively monitors potential threats to the integrity and security of its network.'"
A more detailed description of the threat is at smsanalysis.org/. The actual paper at smsanalysis.org/smsanalysis.pdf.
Easy enough, about 3 or 4 japanese school girls should be able to send a sustained rate of 180 messages a second.
I'M NOT ANGRY!
Most people don't know that you can send text messages for free through Google's text messaging service.
... hello? ...hello?
http://toolbar.google.com/send/sms/index.php
Now all you need is a perl script and
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judge a man by his wallet
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Last year I had a friend that wrote an app that would text message a verse from the 12 days of Christmas every day, but something went horribly wrong and I was getting messaged a verse from that damn song every few milliseconds for a couple hours straight. Not fun.
Hey Steve! (you ass)
So it costs a bunch to send those messages? So what? Bad guys can have some real (or fraudulant) financial resources when that's part of their plan.
...
1) Sign cell phone contract with monthly billing.
2) Send massive amounts of text messages.
3) Blow self up.
4) Don't care if phone bill is high at end of month - having too much fun with the 72 virgins.
5)
6) Profit?
Ch-rist! For that price, I could have a dozen women heavy breathing on my cellphone, telling me how much they love it when I do that to them!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You can email a text message to someone's phone, and for some carriers it is an automatic $0.10 or more a message received and the reciever can't not recieve it. Here are all the SMS addys:
Sprint: 10-digit-number@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Verizon: 10-digit-nmber@vtext.com
AT&T: 10-digit-number@mobile.att.net
T Mobile: 10-digit-number@tmomail.net
Nextel: 10-digit-number@messaging.nextel.com
Cingular: 10-digit-number@mobile.mycingular.net
Alltel: 10-digit-number@message.alltel.com
i can see how they could put in safe-guards like monitoring multiple messages from an IP in a certain time frame. but, smart programmers can work around this fairly easily.
Several years ago I was involved in solving a similiar problem in the GSM/MAP/SS7 backbone network of a major European cellular provider/broker. In that case, there was an problem because the SMS messaging is carried in the MAP "signalling" layer, which resulted in the waste of the vast majority of the bandwidth that was meant to be used to handle subscriber management, roaming, authentication, etc. The network (which provided roaming between 100+ sizable European, Asian, and North African carriers) was being saturated with internet-generated SMS text messaging. Essentially, we were only able to block the traffic, having little control over its generation and/or entry into the network.
Clearly the people that designed the air interface made the same poor architectural decision.