With Nokia in the news because of the Curse of Silence, Sony Ericsson must have been feeling a bit left out. Waaa! We are important too! Look – we even have a ridiculous vulnerability to specially-formed SMS messages of our very own!
By sending a specially-formulated WAP Push message, a it is possible to cause several Sony Ericsson handsets to reboot. Instantly. You don’t have to open the message – it just has to arrive. Oh, and you can queue them up – send several in a row and they will hit in turn, each time the phone recovers.
Ouch.
A WAP Push, if you were wondering, is a special kind of SMS that contains a link to some WAP content. So, now you know.
We are sure that Sony Ericsson are going to be working on a fix for this, but until then it would be best to just hope that you haven’t annoyed anyone who knows how to pull this trick off. Now all that remains is to come up with a snappy name for the exploit.
WAP Wallop, anyone? Push of Doom? No, we’re not feeling it. Suggestions in the comments, if you please.
Additional technical details have been released on our blog: http://www.mseclab.com/?p=135
Regards