Microsoft
says its looking into looking into reports of a potential bug in its
Windows Phone that causes disabling of the device through a text
message. The glitch, first reported by blog WinRumors, is activated when
Windows Phone users gets a SMS with specific text. The glitch causes
rebooting of the phone and goes on to disable the texting app.
According to reports, Khaled Salameh,
the guy who first spotted the flaw, had provided the text to WinRumors,
which is said to have tested the bug with other Windows Phones
including HTC Titan and Samsung Focus Flash. WinRumors has also posted a
video demo, showcasing how the text message reboots the device. "The
attack is not device specific and appears to be an issue with the way
the Windows Phone messaging hub handles messages,” writes
Tom Warren of WinRumours. Meanwhile, Microsoft has released a
statement, saying it is probing the reported Windows Phone messaging
issue.
It's learnt that the glitch can be
triggered through message from Facebook chat or Windows Live Messenger.
WinRumors further says that if a Windows Phone user has pinned a friend
as live tile, and that friend posts the specific text on Facebook, the
phone will be locked. However, this can be deactivated at boot if there
"a small amount of time to get past the lock screen and into the home
screen to remove the pinned live tile before it flips over and locks the
device," Warren writes.
In past, Apple iPhones have also
suffered from such SMS glitches, where attacker could control the
iPhone. Recently, Apple rolled out iOS 5.0.1 update to fix the battery issues in the iPhone 4S. Galaxy Nexus is also reported to have suffered from a hardware bug that forces the phone to automatically change the volume.
Meanwhile, check out the video posted by WinRumors:
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