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'SMS of Death' Could Crash Many Mobile Phones
space_in_your_face writes "Research presented at a conference in Germany last week shows that phones don't even have to be smart to be vulnerable to hackers. Using only Short Message Service (SMS) communications, a pair of security researchers were able to force low-end phones to shut down abruptly and knock them off a cellular network. The trick works for handsets made by Nokia, LG, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Micromax, a popular Indian cell-phone manufacturer."
Peace, at last !
No more stupid ring tones, no more boss (or wife) calls...
GREAT !
... how do I address this 'SMS of death' message to all the phones in my immediate vicinity?
Have gnu, will travel.
Sending the "SMS of Death" has become common practice at theaters in order to finally force people's cell phones to stop ringing.
So this SMS of death, won't cause the handset to beat the user to death with his/her own shoes ? How bitterly dissapointing.
Sure, you might get a few hackers who do it for curiousity to a few numbers with a few types of phones, but eventually they'll get bored and move on to something else. Unless its easy to create binaries that can do something useful to a crim and its easy to send these binaries to ALL types of phones fast then criminal hacker types are unlikely to get involved since its far easier to earn money screwing around with PCs.
You can watch the talk over here: http://mirror.fem-net.de/CCC/27C3/mp4-h264-HQ/27c3-4060-en-attacking_mobile_phones.mp4 or download it via torrent: http://mirror.fem-net.de/CCC/27C3/mp4-h264-HQ/27c3-4060-en-attacking_mobile_phones.mp4.torrent
1266953+17
I had a cheap Virgin Mobile, and if you looked at it funny it would crash.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Article didn't really make it clear. Does it render the phone useless enough to require a replacement, or can service be restored? If the former, it strikes me that a company could surreptitiously use this to try to force a customer into renewing their contract with a new phone?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Another pro for using Google Voice and blocking SMS on my cell
I was getting 404 errors following the original URL.
Corrected URL below:
http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/27021/?p1=MstRcnt
Armaments, 2-9-21 And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade' N
it's a feature phone!
The article is really light on details, but what about these messages cause a phone to crash? Is the phone executing what is supposed to be textual data? Is this certain data just causing a buffer overflow somewhere? What is actually happening?
Buddy, the last time I chose to use IE was on Windows 3, probably IE3.
There were dark days when Netscape 4 couldn't cut it, before Mozilla appeared, when IE was one of the only alternatives, but to be honest I persevered with Netscape and only used IE when sites crashed Netscape. By then though, I was using an advert and junk blocking proxy, so much of what could upset Netscape didn't get through. There was no stopping the effect nested tables had on NN though, nor the fact it would hold the CPU at 100% whilst pages loaded.
Anyway, what is the insinuation about IE? Are you implying that I don't use FF or Seamonkey and so do not have NoScript and Adblock? Or that other add-on that stitches together pages when articles are spread out? I do use FF with NS and AB, so I was presented with a blank grey page between clicking the link for TFA and getting to TFA. TFA had no adverts surrounding it, but that is not the point. The experience presented to me was fucking annoying, and it must only be worse if the adverts are there! I don't use that other add-on to stitch pages together, as I do not want to start down the path of having add-ons for every shortcoming on the web. I feel directly penalising those who create the shortcomings is better.
And people scoff at my 14 year old Qualcomm QCP-1900. I'd send them all an SMS of Death, if my phone could send text messages... (sigh) Still. Try defending yourself from a mugger with a Droid or iPhone - hah!
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
That's not an SMS of death....merely an SMS of irritation.
An SMS of death would involve the recipient's head exploding. Literally.
A signal that could cause the Li-ion batteries to forcibly discharge at once might qualify, as well, but I wouldn't want to make that call. (pun intended)
What happens if you've blocked all incoming text messages (even from the provider)?
(Which subsequently produces meat-space spam to arrive I've found.)
http://www.supercars.net/gallery/132464/1542/873030.jpg
1.This post (and the linked-to article) make a great effort to hide the name of the "conference in Germany". $deity knows why, but the conference was the 27th Chaos Communication Congress (27C3), organised by the Chaos Computer Club.
2.The "SMS of death" was not new in any way - it was well known and discussed back in 2008 at the 25C3. What the researchers effectively showed was that the manufacturers and the GSM networks had *still* not fixed the problem, even years later!
You aren't remembered for doing what is expected of you
Motorola is WAY ahead of these guys. My Motorola CLIQ with "Blur" already shuts itself off randomly and for no evident reason. Who needs a hacker to remotely shut off your phone against your will when the feature is already built-in? :)
If the telcos really can't stop this you could make some good dough holding their network for ransom. They wire you some cash (not too much, it has to be much cheaper for them to pay, stay in the 5-digit range) or you bring all their phones down. During the ransom call (make sure you've got the guy on a wired phone) you demonstrate your attack on everyone in the office (not using the same source as the actual attack of course, probably best to use an untraceable prepaid or stolen SIM with a USB GSM adapter on a laptop (in a different location controlled via a wifi connection, NOT in your lap as you make the ransom call, which should be from a pay phone, and be sure to power down the GSM modem and destroy it after the attack) for your demonstration attack, and ideally you should avoid using the same exploit code that would be used in the real attack, in case they're able to do something to block the attacks fast enough).
Although in reality I don't see why it would be so hard to block all SMS messages containing binary executable data that doesn't come from an approved source, unless the packets are all so nondescript that they can't tell one of these messages from a piece of an MMS or something.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I used to be able to send an instant message over AOL that would cause the other user's CD-ROM drive to open. It was hilarious while it lasted. There were similar exploits that would boot them off the service.
I don't think so. When I read the specs in 2007 binary SMS was not the same as the MMS standard.
Even the names of the old tools, Teardrop and Boink, would be suitable... good times
It might be highly amusing to expose people for the technocrack addicts that they are. Oh my god! My phone won't work, what ever shall I do?!? Let me just curl up into a ball under this park bench until its working again.
Anyone know what to put in the message? Just for research purposes....
Have you seen how teenagers text lately. I'd almost have a hard time figuring out if a legitimate text was binary or not...
I do use FF with NS and AB, so I was presented with a blank grey page between clicking the link for TFA and getting to TFA. TFA had no adverts surrounding it, but that is not the point. The experience presented to me was fucking annoying, and it must only be worse if the adverts are there!
You don't need another extension - Flashblock, Adblock Plus, NoScript, and BugMeNot are all the extensions you'll ever require. All you need to do is learn how to use "Open in New Tab" - it takes all of 5 seconds *while you're reading TFA* for the referenced grey page to load the text. I had to go back and do it all again - very fucking slowly to find out what you're blathering about Buddy.
No one asked about your bloody boring history of browsers - now get off my lawn.