New Attack Can Disable Phones Via SMS

Trailrunner7 writes "A pair of security researchers from Germany demonstrated several techniques at the CanSecWest conference here Wednesday that enable them to remotely reboot, shut down or even completely disable many popular mobile phones with SMS messages. The technique that Nico Golde and Collin Mulliner discussed relies on setting up a GSM network and sending specially crafted SMS messages to handsets. The pair showed a video demonstration of phones from a wide range of manufacturers, including LG, Sony Ericsson, Nokia and others rebooting, freezing and generally acting flaky after receiving the crafted SMS messages they sent."

Comments

Next up twitter?

[skids]

Seriously, how hard can it be to secure a service that consists of nothing but 180 character text messages and a sending/receiving station address? Were the designers of SMS the morons here, or the phone OS coders?

Re:Next up twitter?

[WrongSizeGlass]

Were the designers of SMS the morons here, or the phone OS coders?

Probably both.

Already presented at 27C3 in Berlin in December

[mxs]

The presentation from the 27th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin last December (http://events.ccc.de/congress/2010/Fahrplan/events/4060.en.html) is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bkg3AjY6fs or http://mirror.fem-net.de/CCC/27C3/mp4-h264-HQ/27c3-4060-en-attacking_mobile_phones.mp4 .

Re:It may be in the wild

[swanzilla]

Please turn off your computer.

This is news?

[M3wThr33]

My Palm Pre already locks up and sometimes reboots when I get a regular SMS from anybody.

I hate my phone.

Re:Oh, No. Carriers and Phone Manufacturers will

[Linker3000]

The Iphone 4 has a special 'safe-mode grip' the user can do with their hand that blocks these dangerous messages. It's a 'feature'.