Curse of Silence: Nokia S60 handsets blocked by attack messages

Brief: An easily reproducible SMS exploit was disclosed and demonstrated recently. The exploit is effective against a wide range of Symbian S60 smartphones and will effectively prohibit victims from receiving SMS messages. The exploit affects the messaging components of several versions of the Nokia Series 60 phone.

Security researchers have uncovered a serious vulnerability that affects Nokia Series 60 phones (e.g. the N95, N73, etc) and can stop your mobile from receiving any SMS or MMS messages.

The attack messages will not be visible from the Inbox, and deleting previously received messages will not resolve the problem. Once the atttack is complete the phone will prompt an alert: “Not enough memory to receive message(s). Delete some data first.” There will also be one additional notification on the phone. A blinking envelope, indicating that the Inbox is full, appears in the upper right-hand corner of the display.

Turning the phone off and on again may return some limited functionality, but that functionality is very fragile.

• Exploited phones will remain otherwise completely functional;
• Only the SMS/MMS messaging is affected.

Practically speaking, this also means no SMS notifications of voicemail, though the phone log will display the missed call.

A firmware fix is not yet available. Performing a hard-reset is the only manual solution. And backing up the phone also backs up the exploit messages and the damaged messaging service.

The only way to fix the rejection is a hard reset of the nokia s60 device. So, anyone using a nokia s60 mobile phone had better make sure they regularly backup their handset because you never know if you’ll receive the ‘curse of silence’.

The SMS Curse of Silence affects a wide range of Symbian OS-based smartphones, where potential infected handsets are powered by UIQ as well as S60 2nd Edition Feature Packs 2 and 3, 3rd Edition and 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 operating systems. Those who are running on S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 or 5th Edition can heave a sigh of relieve since they won’t be affected. Guess that means a whole lot of Nokia handsets are in trouble, and with many people sending New Year greetings all over the place, the downtime experienced by infected phones could grow to be pretty serious.