CEO of Clickatell sets the record straigh on DOS sms attacks

Pieter de Villiers, Clickatell's CEO, responds to a story posted last week DOS attacks taking down cellular networks through SMS.

"A number of recent media reports have drawn attention to the possibility that cellular networks could be severely compromised by hackers exploiting SMS vulnerabilities. While these articles make for an interesting read, as chief executive of one of the world's leading mobile messaging aggregators, Clickatell, I had to raise an eyebrow at some of the comments that emerged from these report.

In my opinion the scenario described is fairly unlikely by any stretch of the imagination. First and foremost, SMS is not like email in that it usually needs to be paid for individually. Delivering spam SMS at 165 messages per second would cost close to $ 4,000 per minute. Free SMS services would not be able to deliver messages at that rate.

In addition, all operator enabled connections have message throttling and load management so a total disruption of service is unlikely.

An alternative scenario is gathering together 165 people to send an SMS at once. This too is unlikely due to the complicated logistics as well as SMS's store and forward capability. This means that if a message is not delivered, it will wait until the network or phone is available to be delivered at a later stage.

All large companies and mobile operators protect themselves from typical denial of service attacks via their standard internet and systems security. In addition, I would hardly describe the situation outlined in the report as a hacking incident, and more of a spamming issue.

The fact is that disasters such as Katrina have a far greater impact on bringing a network down due to the unexpected all load. And it is in these cases where SMS actually proves to be more reliable due to the smaller data size allowing messages to get through congested networks.

I'd be very interested to receive any recorded case of the 160 character SMS bringing down a network or cluster. I certainly agree with the statements in the reports that “SMS is becoming an increasingly more important part of the cellular network”, but I must contest the likelihood of the described situation ever occurring.

emily | 5:44 PM | Spam, Viruses and Hoaxes |
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