The folks over at WinRumors have reported that Microsoft’s Windows Phone is vulnerable to an SMS attack which can disable the Messaging Hub on phones. A specially crafted message when sent to the phone causes the Messaging Hub to hang and restart the phone. Once the phone is restarted, the Messaging Hub will refuse to open up subsequently.
It’s not just limited to SMS messages. The specially crafted message can be sent via Facebook as well, and if a Live Tile opens up that message for display, the same problem crops up on the phone. Luckily they haven’t publicly disclosed this bug on the Internet, but contacted the folks at Microsoft directly for a patch. We hope Microsoft rolls out a patch for this before someone else discovers this bug and starts attacks targetted towards users of Windows Phone devices.
At present, the only way to recover from an attack like this is to completely reset the device and wipe all the data off the phone.
Here’s a video from WinRumors of how the attack affects the phone
via WinRumors
