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‘Curse of Silence’ Bug Does Nasty Things to Nokia S60 Devices

Categories: Nokia, Videos
By: , IntoMobile
Wednesday, December 31st, 2008 at 7:38 AM

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 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]

About The Author

James Falconer

James was born and raised in Winnipeg, Canada. Almost 15 years ago he started out in the 'real world' as a web and graphic designer. Through the years he has finely tuned his skills in SEO, internet marketing, conversion strategy, and project management. To date, he runs his own successful consulting business where he advises companies all over the globe. A co-founder of www.crackberry.com, and sole proprietor of www.mactropolis.com, James in recent years has become very active in the tech blogosphere. Online community building and strategy is fast becoming one of his passions. Watch for James' no frills attitude, unique perspective and to-the-point comments here on IntoMobile!

  • anon

    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