‘Curse of Silence’ Bug Does Nasty Things to Nokia S60 Devices
By James Falconer on Wednesday, December 31st, 2008 at 7:38 AM PST In Nokia, Videos
The ‘Curse of Silence’. You read it right… No, not the ‘Cone of Silence‘… The ‘Curse of Silence’!
My pal John over at MobileSyrup shot this over to me in my email this morning, and I was quite intrigued. What a great way to ring in the New Year I thought… With news of such a fantastic bug 
The ‘Curse of Silence’ effects Nokia (NYSE: NOK) S60 devices, so if you own one, take heed. Spare a few minutes and check out the video above for more information on it.
The coles notes version? A hacker sends a unique SMS message to you that has a unique 32 character ‘email address’ with a space at the end of it. When the message is received, your S60 rejects all incoming messages whether they’re text or email. The only way to fix it is a hard reset of your device. To all Nokia S60 users (and heck, anyone else out there for that matter) please make sure you backup your device often. You never know when you’re going to need to restore your device 
Note: This has been documented to work against version 2.2, 2.3, 3.0 & 3.1 Nokia S60 devices.
Thanks John!
[Via: MobileSyrup]
I was just reading more about this bug. Take a look at what I found: http://www.telecomengine.com/newsglobe/article.asp?HH_ID=AR_4683
I have this code – It can seriously mess up phones that aren’t meant to be used with that code, in which greater problems happen. For example, your phone will drain the battery everytime its charged, and it does it by the battery serial number. You’d have to buy a new battery in order for it to work properly again: after doing the full restart to the phone aswell.
I tracked the person who sent me this text message. After multiple attempts to contact people from symbian, I have not received any response. So if its not real then I’m considering releasing the serial code as an open source research information.
smscode@filmstaffers.com