back to article Nokia 'Curse of Silence' SMS exploit uncovered

Mobile phone security vendors were rejoicing last night when it emerged that an obscure bug in an old version of the Symbian OS could allow an attacker to crash a target's mobile phone with a specially-formatted text message. The attack has been rather dramatically branded the "Curse of Silence", and is a genuine bug that …

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  1. David Thorn
    Stop

    Recently added to 3GPP specs?

    The article imples that being able to instruct the handset to treat an SMS as Internet Electronic Mail is a relatively recent addition to the 3GPP specifications. It's certainly been in the specs since 03.40-540 (late 1996?), but that's the earliest one I have to hand...

  2. Steve Foster

    Turn it into a feature?

    A little application "Stop All SMS Spam" that deliberately "silences" your own Nokia, perhaps?

    Much more effective than the TPS or anything your carrier offers...

    BWAHAHAAAA.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Wow, a bug in S60

    fair enough it's a remotely exploitable bug, and that makes it slightly different

    however the fact that S60 has so many bugs that it requires a hard reset every other day means it's hardly worth bragging about.

  4. Apocalypse Later

    typocal

    "Short messaging was seen as the ideal way of delivering email alerts, but the combination of price and increasing spam levels paid to most of them"

    "Put paid" perhaps? Doesn't make sense as printed anyway. Shall we all poke fun at the Telegraph for their typos again?

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Great idea

    I wouldn't call it a bug, Nokia can bill it as a feature-and excellent way to keep your teenage kids from running up your bill sending monosyllabic drivel back and forth.

  6. Matthew
    Happy

    Not new

    Nokia phones are full of such bugs.

    I remember at school, having great fun crashing people's Nokia phones just by sending them a too-long business card thingie. causing a buffer overflow whenever they tried to open the message

  7. Matthew Keenan
    Boffin

    3 offers no help

    I was told today by 3 technical support that they can't filter these types of messages because they would not be able to recognise them; knowing the efficacy of 3's systems this is probably true!

  8. TeeCee Gold badge
    Unhappy

    @Matthew

    I suppose that makes a change from sodding Nokia owners sending you someone's number in Nokia business card format and causing your Samsung/LG/Ericsson/Motorola/whatever to shit itself when you opened it, like they used to in the bad old days. Bastards!

    Wish I'd known about *that* little trick at the time.....

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    RSS Feeds?

    so is this the case with the News RSS feeds also?

    is that why my phone keeps ceasing??

    Right I'm off to unset that recent RSS feed...

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