You may not think much of SMS messages hitting your phone every day, but two researchers revealed earlier today at a hacking conference in Berlin, Germany, that SMS could be used to attack and shut down individual cell phones or an entire carrier network.
The attack discussed at the 27C3 conference resemble the nature of a denial of service attack with a huge number of messages being sent of cell phones. In this specific case, Collin Mulliner and Nico Golde of the Technical University of Berlin tested cell phones in an isolated environment and shot 120,000 messages at them. The phones tested were simple feature phones (as opposed to smartphones such as the iPhone or Android devices) with just one processors as their operating systems usually shut down when just one application crashes. It is estimated that there are currently more than 4.6 billion feature phones in use today.
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