Preventing Smart-Phone Armageddon

MIT TechnologyReview

In 2009, Scott Totzke, vice president of security at Research in Motion — maker of the BlackBerry smartphone — told Reuters that his nightmare scenario was a type of attack in which a sufficient number of smart phones in a given area were compromised in a way that they would send so much data through a local cell phone network that normal cell phone service would effectively be knocked out.

Now researchers are working on a way to prevent the kind of malicious access that would allow such an attack. The bad news is it’s nowhere near being implemented yet, leaving many smartphones vulnerable to being compromised and exploited.

To understand the attack, which is the cell-phone equivalent of what’s known as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, it helps to understand that something like it has happened before — on 9/11. On that day a phenomenon common to many natural disasters and large-scale emergencies occurred: everyone tried to call out from or into the Manhattan cell phone network at once, overloading the network and making it almost impossible for calls to get through. Article