Text message kills mobile phones
Published: 19 Mar 2003 08:28 GMT
A short text message is spelling death for mobile phones in Europe.
The wireless email, among the 1 billion sent each day in the region, can freeze or completely disable two mobile phones made by German handset maker Siemens, spokesman Jacob Rice said in New Orleans on Tuesday.
The emails contain a single word, taken from the phone's language menu, surrounded by quote marks and preceded by an asterisk, such as "*English" or "*Deutsch", Siemens said.
Opening the short text message on a Siemens 35 series cell completely disables it, Rice said. Siemens 45 series phones are less impacted and can be resuscitated after about two minutes of work, Rice said. Both phones are sold only in Europe.
The phones are not the victim of a denial of service attack, as suggested by some participating in an email string on Bugtraq, a popular security email list, Rice said. "It's just not possible," Rice said.
Denial of service attacks are very rare on mobile phones. There has been only one known case in the past two years, when an email virus sent to Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo subscribers forced the phones to call that country's emergency services agencies.
Software problems, however, are much more common on mobile phones. DoCoMo has had the most publicised of problems, having to recall thousands of mobile phones in the past few years because of software snafus.
Regardless of the reason for the Siemens phone breakdowns, it's unwelcome news at a mobile phone industry gathering here this week for the CTIA Wireless 2003 show as major US carriers push harder than ever to sell wireless data services and more sophisticated mobile phones.
"Security is something we take very seriously," said Microsoft spokesman Ed Suwanjindar. He said Microsoft provides application developers with the necessary tools to write anti-virus software from the phones.
Carriers also have the option to "lock" the phones down, so only applications such as games or ring tones that pass a carrier's certification process can be downloaded onto phones, Suwanjindar said.
"We haven't seen a lot of these problems," but have also taken precautions against it, said a spokesman for Palm, whose software-rich Tungsten W recently went on sale in the US.
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