Google with its Nexus devices are giving hard competition to leading smartphones and tablets by their cost and features, but this SMS attack vulnerability may give users and future nexus purchasers an extreme call regardless of whether get one. Although Google’s smartphone operating system Android has advanced and become a more secure than it was several years back, but this SMS attack vulnerability has driven Google developers think on fixing this bug.

Problem:

Bogdan Alecu, a system administrator at Dutch IT services company Levi9 demonstrated this vulnerability at DefCamp 2013 in Bucharest. Tested a few devices and found that only Nexus devices were vulnerable to this bug or DOS (denial of service attack). The Nexus devices rebooted or lost network connectivity or even crashed the messaging app after this attack.

[ad type=”banner”]

How does this work:

An attacker sends 30 flash messages one after another to a particular nexus device. Flash messages are important for giving information to people. These messages don’t have notification or indication, so you might not even know that you are receiving these messages while the screen is off.

What are the consequences of this attack:

This denial of service attack (DDOS) of flash messages leads to rebooting of the Nexus device, losing the internet connectivity or crashing of the messaging app. The most noticeably bad part is that since the messages receive without any notification, you might not have any clue that somebody used DDOS attack on your phone unless it reboots itself.

How to prevent SMS attack:

Now Google is considering on the issue, so nobody knows when Google might fix it, but there is an app available on Google Play. Class0Firewall that can block or regulate the number of flash messages received per minute thus saving your nexus device from this attack.

Categorized in: