News - Monday, January 5, 2009 13:00 - 1 Comment

The S60 “Curse of Silence” bug – and how Nokia plans to beat it

Over the Christmas period it was discovered that Nokia S60 phones can be affected by a nasty little exploit that stops the device from receiving SMS and MMS messages.

Theatrically dubbed “The Curse of Silence”, the exploit is triggered when a device running S60 2.6, 2.8, 3.0 or 3.1 is sent a specially formatted SMS containing an email address more than 32 characters long. The phone won’t display this message, but if it’s running 2.6 or 3.0 it will not be able to receive any SMS or MMS messages. Phones running 2.8 or 3.1 will not lock up until they’ve received eleven of these specially formatted messages – although as you can’t see the messages you won’t even know if you’re being targetted.

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