Windows Phones message hub hit by killer SMS A security flaw has been discovered in Microsoft's Windows Phone OS which allows hackers to disable a handset's messaging system by SMS. A malicious text can be sent which stops the SMS service from working, WinRumours reports. A factory reset is the only way to remedy the issue. Although the SMS content is hidden from view, …
on the same day Microsoft launched it's viral hate campaign against Android on twitter using it's army of braindead marketing drones bribed with the chance to win a WIndows Phone 7 that had the shop dust brushed off of it...
LOL...
http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2011/12/13/microsoft-free-windows-phone-if-you-slag-off-android-on-twitter/
#EPICFAIL
to make up stories about Android malware to win a phone that they can't sell for love or money isn't bribery and it's not viral marketing?
What planet do you live on?
This is almost as low as Microsoft have ever sunk (in public at least, most of their usual viral marketing, as I guess you know, happens undercovers).
I think YOU'RE a Microsoft shill.
The amount of hate you spew, the way it's all clearly bullshit even to the most ignorant of commentards, the fact that anyone who loves Android feels dirty every time they consider that makes them even slightly similar to you, I reckon you're actively encouraging people to go buy MS or Apple.
You've probably already done wonders for XBox sales.
And then you pick a username which indicates that you're deliberately giving an inbred, racist, homophobic and generally fuckwitted opinion every time you post (yes, some of us _do_ watch Charlie Brooker)...
It adds up.
How much do they pay you?
So you didn't read the part of the article that said that this wasn't as bad as the iPhone text message attack that allowed the attacker to access the phone?
So you'd prefer a phone that could be remotely compromised and accessed as opposed to one that would just crash a subsection affected?
Well that would start to explain a lot.
You must have missed the part in that article that described how complicated it was to do since you needed the ability to send special network control SMSs (which are not shown at the remote end).
In this case however, anyone can send the text that triggers the bug.
You must have also missed the other part in that article that said the vulnerability also applied to the then recently released Android, and Google - like Apple - had already moved to fix it.
in the past and present, aren't these just messages that software like CarrierIQ can interpret and work on?
Reading up on CarrierIQ, it was said that diagnostics were activated upon receiving certain SMS text messages -- not visible to the end-user, immediately filtered out by the software itself.
inb4trolls
Someone's going to do the "Waa! You talk about iPhone exploits in a WP exploit story!", the same way you get "Waa! You talk about Android exploits in an iPhone exploit story!" comments.
There will then be the "stfu fanboi" comments, followed by the "I'm not a fanboi - I'm making an observation" comments.
Ha! I preempted all of you!
(Is there any attack vector that only works on one OS - abstracting "iTunes bug X" as "computer interface software bug X" for example)
More likely the exploit consists of sending text with embedded characters which the app doesn't catch but which corrupt the database when they're stored. e.g. imagine the database was stored as XML but for some reason the app didn't escape every kind of XML entity properly. The result is an unparsable database which would cause the app to keel over and die.
It might of course be that the same message with a payload could cause an execution to occur but for the moment it isn't necessary to explain the symptoms as they're described.
From RFC 791 back in 1981:
"...an implementation must be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior. That is, it must be careful to send well-formed datagrams, but must accept any datagram that it can interpret..."
OK, so RFC791 wasn't written for SMS messages, but the core meaning still applies.
If you want to go further back in history: George Santayana back in 1905 (ish)
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"
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