Tackling the Mobile Phone Threat Called SMS Curse of Silence

As mobile phones and mobile technology become more and more popular, the threats are slowly shifting to the mobile platform as well and this has prompted security providers to extend their applications to mobile devices.

Recently a new threat dubbed the SMS Curse of Silence has been discovered, this threat is a security exploit that crashes the SMS function of the phone to prevent users from receiving new text
messages. It’s a kind of denial-of-service attack (DoS) which crashes the phone’s SMS system, so user cannot send or receive text messages on their phone, but the other phone functions still work.

The problem affects a wide range of Symbian OS-based smart phones (UIQ devices and S60 2nd Edition Feature Packs 2 and 3, 3rd Edition and 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1; S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 or 5th Edition phones are not affected).

This Curse of Silence problem simply crashes the SMS function of the phone. Since most smart phones can now connect to the Internet, a bigger problem awaits the mobile world users both business and personal. The good news is that there is a way to clean this mess up by using
F-Secure’s Mobile Security solution that prevents this exploit by detecting it and by repairing the phone so that users won’t lose their precious inbox messages. More details on similar security measures could be found on Nokia official websites.