Texting bugs bother smartphones

While I busy myself looking at the unboxing photos of the Motorola Aura and saying “oooh, shiny,” here are a few smartphone security and bug items for you.

First in the crosshairs are Nokia users –- a big target — who could get hit by the “Curse of Silence” exploit. Although it sounds like a James Bond movie, the attack prevents a long list of phones using Symbian S60 from receiving SMS messages.

[ Interested in more IT security news? Check out InfoWorld’s Roger A. Grimes’ “Security Adviser” blog. ]

The Curse exploits a glitch in the way that Symbian S60 handles texts so that any message from a sender with a name over 32 characters (and changing the protocol identifier) flags the message as Internet Electronic Mail and the phone goes quiet. The only fix is a factory reset, although there is some rumbling that F-Secure users are protected. Check out the video and list of affected devices.

Also having SMS problems are LG Incite users (yes, there is an SMS bug and no, you didn’t do anything wrong). Incite users are receiving a message stating, “Your text message can not be sent,” and the message is, obviously, not sent.

While it appears that AT&T is aware of the problem and that LG is busy working on a correction, some users of other AT&T devices (Treo Pro) have also received this message, so this may be widespread -– or completely unrelated. Either way, if the forums at AT&T are any indication, this has already affected too many users. We’ll keep you posted as soon as we hear about a fix.