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Lone Packet Crashes Telco Networks

Posted by Soulskill on from the sharpshooting-with-information dept.

mask.of.sanity writes "A penetration tester has shown that GSM communications systems can be taken down with a handful of malformed packets. The weakness was in the lack of security around the Home Location Register server clusters which store GSM subscriber details as part of the global SS7 network. A single packet, sent from within any network including femtocells, took down one of the clusters for two minutes."

1 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The RF portion of the standards is well designe by jonwil · · Score: 1, Troll

    GSM, UMTS and LTE are not complex because they need to be, they are complex because a lot of entities with massive patent portfolios spent billions of dollars ensuring that they are complex (by finding ways to get as many of their patents as possible into the standards)