Mobile Phone Networks under Threat from DoS Attack

Over recent years, 'Denial of Service' (DoS) attacks on websites have become quite common, and have been used to bring down a number of websites, including banks. Now hackers are targeting mobile phone networks.

A DoS attack works by employing 'botnets', which are networks of computers that have had a bot installed on them clandestinely. When these bots are activated, they send page view requests to a website. If a sufficient number of these bots are operating simultaneously, the targeted website will be unable to cope with the traffic and will crash.

Now it has been discovered that mobile phone networks are vulnerable to the same kind of attack, and if this happened, millions of users would be unable to use their phones.

In fact it requires just a relatively small number of phones to be compromised by bots in order to halt a massive network, for instance only 12,000 compromises mobile phones would be capable of crashing 93% of a network with one million users. What makes it even more dangerous is that the phone's owner would not even be aware that their phone was involved in the botnet.

This is not just theory, and a similar botnet has already been written and distributed via the SMS worm Sexy Space. This is spread through SMS messages. Anyone who opened up a link in the message would be taken to a website where software would be downloaded onto their phone and this software would allow the hacker to take over the phone. Thankfully Sexy Space, an attack that is believed to have its origins in China, failed to accomplish its objectives. This particular worm exploited a vulnerability in the Symbian operating system that is used in Nokia Smartphones, though this has now been closed by Symbian security experts.

Just as in computers, with mobile phones there is an ongoing battle between the hackers on one side and the security experts on the other. In order to keep your Nokia or any other Smartphone safe, you are advised to keep it updated with the latest antivirus software.