[hibby50]

Those great unstoppable iPhones are now very much in danger. With a simple text message they can be taken over and used to send texts, view things from the camera, and listen in to conversation. The SMS allows hackers to execute arbitrary code. Security expert Charlie Miller, the man who found its flaw, said that he'd reveal the details of it at Black Hat security conference. They informed Apple of the problem 6 weeks ago. The attack is enabled by a serious memory corruption bug in the way the iPhone handles SMS messages, said Miller. This can even render the iPhones useless.

Android-based phones were found to be similarly susceptible to an SMS attack, only an attacker could temporarily knock the phone off the cell network but not take control.

Also a bug in the code written by HTC that controls the user interface on Windows Mobile devices could also be exploited via the SMS messages to make it so there are no buttons to push so the phone can't be used.

For the hack to work, the hacker must send hundreds of SMS control messages, which are different from regular SMS messages, according to Miller. Only the initial SMS may be seen, he said. They will demonstrate the attack on an Android phone and an iPhone during their presentation on Thursday.