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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:Hardly surprising... by Severus+Snape · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You surely can't be that naive and must be trolling. GSM masts are critical pieces of infrastructure in mobile telecoms and it's in every stakeholders that they are secure and reliable. It's security researchers jobs to find these holes, if they were so poorly designed we'd see stories like this every day.