Cell Phones Vulnerable To SMS Of Death

A single text can shut down and knock low-end handsets -- from Nokia, LG, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Micromax -- off of a cell phone network, say researchers.

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Low-end mobile phones can be sent an SMS-of-Death to shut them down, knock them off of a cellular network, or even turn them into a brick.
So said researchers in a presentation at the recent 27th Chaos Communication Congress, a computer security conference in Berlin. Feature phones from such manufacturers as Nokia, LG, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Micromax are vulnerable.
In their presentation, the researchers -- Collin Mulliner and Nico Golde, respectively a PhD student and undergraduate at the Technical University of Berlin -- detailed techniques for attacking feature phones on a large scale via short message service (SMS). The attacks range from interrupting phone calls, to disconnecting people from the network, and sometimes even bricking phones remotely, they said. Vulnerable phones are offered by all of the worlds major carriers.
Smartphones may be all the rage these days -- typically running iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian, or Windows Phone 7 operating systems -- but only about one in six of the worlds mobile phones are actually smartphones.
The rest are what are known as feature phones. According to Web site
Know Your Mobile
, feature phones predominantly run on a proprietary Java ME platform and can, for this reason, only run basic applications -- hence why theyre called feature and not smart phones.
Network operators often use SMS messages to remotely update feature phones. Mulliner and Golde took a similar approach, but used it to distribute malicious binaries. They also warned that a major attack developer would need to create just a handful of SMS messages -- one for each of the worlds most popular handsets. Using inexpensive, mass-mailing SMS services, attackers could quickly and easily execute the attack on a wide scale.
According to MITs
Technology Review
,
Mulliner said
that network operators are the only organizations able to defend against these types of attacks, either by updating phone firmware to block malicious binaries, or else by intercepting malicious SMS messages -- as is now done with spam -- before theyre allowed to reach handsets.
According to the
Technology Review
, Mulliner and Golde say they contacted network operators and manufacturers months before their talk but were told it wasnt possible to get fixes ready in time.

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