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The Register is reporting about a possible threat involves SMS messaging and how it could shut down entire mobile phone networks. Mobile phone networks could be swamped by text messages to phones in a denial of service attack by hackers, academics warn. A paper by Enck, Traynor, McDaniel, and La Porta of Pennsylvania State University explains that if too many text messages are sent to phones in the the same cell of a mobile network at the same time the cell's control channel might be monopolised, preventing new calls from being initiated.
The academics suggest it might be possible to deny voice service to cities the size of Washington with "little more than a cable modem" by sending hundreds of SMS messages a second from a broadband connected PC.
This reminds me of the ILUVYOU virus when we had "mail to pager" service set up. Somebody had our pagers in their contact list, so all of our pagers went off, over and over and over. I guess it could happen using SMS...what do you think?
About two or three years ago there was a small scandal in the UK around this, some text messages were not being delivered but the user was still being charged. The operators explained that national radio stations were starting to hold competitions which could be entered by text (SMS), as a result there were 1,000s of messages in a very short time, the system dealt with this by just dropping messages above their capacity. (No they didn't justify still charging the sender the money grabbing Effers).
I believe they sorted out this by increasing the capacity of their systems. In the above scenario I guess at worse the same would happen and some texts would be lost, if they have properly dealt with the problem then it would mean added delay to the system.
Linear Mode
