hacking

The Mobile Minute: Hacking GSM Calls, California Rules Against Mobile Privacy, and More

Posted by AnneryanHeatwole on Jan 11, 2011

It's a new year, and the Mobile Minute is back to bring you the latest. We've got coverage on doctors using mobile money for bus fares for fistula patient, Britain's minister of civil society questioning Apple's no-donation apps policy, the BBC's coverage on how hackers can eavesdrop on GSM calls, the California Supreme Court's ruling that police can search the cell phones of arrested people without a warrant, and CGAP's look at current, non-mobile money transfer systems in Haiti.

NYTimes: Text Hackers Could Jam Cellphones, a Paper Says

Posted by on Oct 07, 2005

From today's New York Times: "Malicious hackers could take down cellular networks in large cities by inundating their popular text-messaging services with the equivalent of spam, said computer security researchers, who will announce the findings of their research today." (more)

Interesting research to follow. While it has always seemed that it would be easy to jam a specific phone with many simultaneous messages, the overall networks have always seemed quite resilient to me. I think this research is assuming that the operators don't have a quick way to shut down DOS attacks coming through Internet gateways.

Hopefully, this won't lead to the operators rethinking how open they currently are via SMTP and HTTP, which wouldn't bode very well for us and the type of free and open applications we've all developed and rely on.