Getting a text message is akin to someone sliding a piece of mail under your door: You may not have asked for it, you can’t stop its delivery and you have to deal with it whether you want to or not.
The fact that text messages appear on mobile phones without any interaction from the user, and sometimes with limited interference from the cellular network operators, can give criminals an opening to break into those devices, as three teams of researchers showed Thursday at the Black Hat security conference here.
Their targets ran the gamut.
Apple’s iPhones and phones running Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and Google’s Android operating systems were all shown to be vulnerable. In some cases, the problems weren’t with software, but the way cellular networks process messages.
The Associated Press
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