The New York Times is reporting recent resarch which indicates that malicious "hackers" could take down cellular networks in large cities by inundating their popular text-messaging services with the equivalent of spam - apparently 165 messages a second into the network would congest manhattan.
Sprint's senior manager for wireless messaging operations, however, said that this was only a problem if cellular companies were unprepared and did not have a system in place to prevent it.
This is probably right - is is trivial to impose flow-control mechanisms, which means that the author's contention that all major cellular networks were vulnerable, and that a single computer with a cable modem could do the job, is probably overblown - at least if network providers sit up and take notice.
Of course this does not preclude a sufficiently sophisticated attacker from succeeding, but all things considered this is not news: Of course every digital service provider is susceptible to a denial of service attack. At this point, it's simply another business risk.
[via Engadget]
