Cloud storage: Lower cost and increase uptime

Many mainstream mobiles can be crashed after opening a maliciously constructed SMS message.

The so-called 'SMS of death' attacks affects mobiles from Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and LG, among others. Details of the attack, a variant of earlier attacks along the same lines, were outlined by security researchers Collin Mulliner and Nico Golde during a presentation at the Chaos Communication Congress (27C3) in Berlin.

Golde said that Samsung mobiles were particularly vulnerable to multi-part text messages, for example. LG phones were often bowled over by maliciously constructed MMS messages. Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones often crashed before confirming the receipt of a rogue text. This means that the network attempts to resend a killer text after a user reboots a crashed mobile. Restoring normality involves transferring a SIM card onto a non-vulnerable phone and deleting the poison pill text message.

The range of flaws ought to concern network operators as well as handset manufacturers. Mulliner said that by sending a range of attacks a miscreant might create a situation where thousands of users attempt to reconnect with the network at around the same time, straining network infrastructure and possibly causing secondary (possibly cascading) problems. Targeting attacks against a particular individual - providing it was known which model of phone he was using - might also be possible.

A lot of effort in security circles over recent months has gone into discovering flaws in Android, iPhone and other smartphones by 84 per cent of phone in use are less advanced feature phones. The two security researchers hope their research will help address this knowledge imbalance.

Both researchers called for suppliers to increase the frequency of security updates as well as making updates easier to apply. ®

SaaS data loss: The problem you didn’t know you had