Hurray for the 5110

A recent article that came out in the Philippine Star talked about a conference of black hat hackers or crackers and the danger of cellphone hacking. These hackers are able to access the phones internal memory as well as its web browsing. They are able to use these to force your phone to go to porn websites or other sites or worse yet, they are able to get control of your contacts thru your address book.

But more insidious is the manner in which they are able to do all this. Through texts messages that might not even appear on your phone!!!

Apparently if there is weakness in the providers security, they are able to access the admin messages that are sent by the providers. These are the "290" messages that globe autosends to remind you to pay your bill or to inform you of upcoming promos. Worse yet are the notification messages that just go through your cell phone without even appearing on screen.

Furthermore, the hackers point out that there are certain operating systems such as the ones from Microsoft and Google which are susceptible. These systems process SMS messages in a certain way that allow the hackers to get control of your phone. Those which are particularly susceptible are high end phones which double as a computer such as the Blackberries and the like.

It is an extremely pernicious form of attack vector because we can't do anything about the means of attack. We can't stop the phone from receiving sms from our providers and worse yet, we keep our phones on 24/7. Imagine how big our bill would be if they use the phone to browse 24/7 as well.

I guess the only surefire defense against this attack is to use our ever reliable 5110 which can be used as a projectile if someone annoys us and afterwards would still work without a hitch. :-)