Monday, February 02, 2009

Crash Nokia s60 phones- Curse of Silence - cure found

Are you affected by the "Curse of Silence" ?

You just stop receiving any text message: "People who send messages to me may report that they get a delivery report, but I don't get any SMS on my Nokia phone !"


It can be almost classified as a mobile virus or malware, but ti isn't - but unlike other mobile malware : This can affect the user without any interaction from his/her part.


Released when the new year of 2009 began, the following advisory shows how some Nokia phones can be made to stop receiving SMS simply by sending it a text message (SMS) formatted in a special way. It can be sent by fairly any normal Nokia phone but it affects only specific Nokia smartphone models.

http://berlin.ccc.de/~tobias/cos/s60-curse-of-silence-advisory.txt

Affected phones are :

S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 1 (S60 3.1):
Nokia E90 Communicator
Nokia E71
Nokia E66
Nokia E51
Nokia N95 8GB
Nokia N95
Nokia N82
Nokia N81 8GB
Nokia N81
Nokia N76
Nokia 6290
Nokia 6124 classic
Nokia 6121 classic
Nokia 6120 classic
Nokia 6110 Navigator
Nokia 5700 XpressMusic

S60 3rd Edition, initial release (S60 3.0):
Nokia E70
Nokia E65
Nokia E62
Nokia E61i
Nokia E61
Nokia E60
Nokia E50
Nokia N93i
Nokia N93
Nokia N92
Nokia N91 8GB
Nokia N91 
Nokia N80
Nokia N77
Nokia N73
Nokia N71
Nokia 5500
Nokia 3250

S60 2nd Edition, Feature Pack 3 (S60 2.8):
Nokia N90
Nokia N72
Nokia N70

S60 2nd Edition, Feature Pack 2 (S60 2.6):
Nokia 6682
Nokia 6681
Nokia 6680
Nokia 6630
This might work out to be a nasty prank since its very easy to do and the receiver doesn't even know when he gets it.

This is not much of a problem now since most mobile service providers now block the malformed messages that do this, but just in case you want to be safe, nokia has released a patch for the so called "Curse of silence"

The Curse f Silnce cleaner can be downloaded from Nokia's website.

Update: Android Whatsapp bug in 2014 that did a similar thing.
Update : iPhone bug crashes iMessenger with an evil text message "effective Power Arabic"

Here's the direct link to the smscleaner

Install and run the application to remove the offending text messages if you have been sent any.


Please do leave a comment if you were affected - who did it, why and did they tell you ?

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