Spam-like Text Messages May Threaten Cellular Networks
Posted by Steve Chung
Although it hasn't happened yet, it seems inevitable that before long "[m]alicious hackers [will] take down cellular networks in large cities by inundating their popular text-messaging services with the equivalent of spam". This from the New York Times, reporting on a paper released by professors at Penn State.
Patrick D. McDaniel, a professor of computer science at Pennsylvania State University who conducts research on computer security, projected that you could congest a cellular network of all of Manhattan by simply sending 165 text messages a second into the network, using nothing more than a single computer with a cable modem. And if that's not thinking big enough for you, how about this:
it would be theoretically possible to knock out cellular service for the continent with a data rate of approximately 370 Mbps. Such bandwidth could be harnessed from a moderately sized "zombie" network. Much larger Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have already been seen, making this attack plausible.
Potential text message spammers would face the challenge of finding enough working cellphone numbers within one geographical area, but researchers have been able to accomplish this task by using search engines like Google to assemble, for example, over 7,000 cellular numbers in New York City and over 6,000 celluar numbers in Washington D.C. Potential solutions to prevent this type of attack include limiting the number of text messages that can go into the network or possibly separating out the voice and text data in the next round of cell phone technology.
