A vulnerability has been found on Android that could allow attackers to disable a smartphone using a special SMS. Victims don't even need to open the message. Moreover, it won't appear in the incoming SMS at all. In some cases, the phone may get stuck in an endless reboot.
A vulnerability has been found on Android that could allow attackers to disable a smartphone using a special SMS. Victims don't even need to open the message. Moreover, it won't appear in the incoming SMS at all. In some cases, the phone may get stuck in an endless reboot.
This is reported by BleepingComputer.
The vulnerability has been dubbed SMS of Death. The problem lies in the way Android handles certain service SMS messages. If a specially crafted message is sent, the system incorrectly reads its data, causing the process responsible for mobile communications to crash.
At this point, the smartphone loses connection to the network, and even ongoing phone calls are interrupted. The attack can even interrupt a call to emergency services.
And during experiments, researcher Mark Blah found that a series of about 20 malicious messages can cause the phone to reboot over and over again. The thing is that the system sometimes tries to process the same SMS again. As a result, the smartphone restarts, encounters another malicious message - and crashes again. To get the smartphone back to work, it had to be reset to factory settings.
Another GitHub user has found another way to remove the malicious messages using the Android Debug Bridge (ADB), a tool for controlling your phone from your computer. But that requires some technical skills.
According to the researcher, Google fixed the issue in the October security updates for Android 14–17. But devices with older versions of the system may remain vulnerable.
Users are advised to install the latest available security updates. You can check for them in your smartphone's settings, under the software update section.
Previously, dev.ua wrote about another Android vulnerability that allowed attackers to replace links in messages.
