Google’s Nexus Devices Susceptible To SMS Bug That Causes Phones To Reboot

If you use any of the Google Nexus devices, like the Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4, or Nexus 5, it seems that there is a bug/exploit floating out there that has the ability to either reboot your phone, disable your network connection temporarily, or crash your messaging app. This is due to a flood of Class 0 SMS messages that are being sent to your phone, which we guess sounds familiar to DDoS attacks on computers, except that this will be for your phones. This bug was discovered by IT administrator Bogdan Alecu. According to his findings, it seems that non-Nexus devices appear to be safe, although Alecu admits that he has yet to test it out on a wide variety of devices yet, although so far, so good.

While it is unknown how widespread this problem is, Google has told the folks at PCWorld that they are looking into the exploit but they are unclear as to when a patch to fix the issue might be released, stating, “We thank him for bringing the possible issue to our attention and we are investigating.” However it seems that the good news is that there is a firewall app in the Google Play store called Class0Firewall which reportedly does the trick protecting against such attacks, so until Google releases a patch, this is an app you might be interested in checking out.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: bugs, Google, nexus