Posted 04/20/09 at 09:57:18 AM by Paul Lilly

According to mobile security firm Trust Digital, you're at a real risk of falling prey to an SMS attack while you sleep. Dubbed the "Midnight Raid Attack," because it's mostly run at night, a hacker who has the right toolkits and know-how could send a malicious text message to your phone capable of firing up the web browser and navigating to a harmful website. Once there, the site downloads a dirty executable to your phone intended to steal your private data, said Trust Digital.

"This is a completely real threat," said Phillippe Winthrop, a director in the global wireless practice at Strategy Analytics. "We will see these attacks. It's a matter of time."

Another type of attack has a hacker sending a malicious SMS 'control message' over the GSM network to a victim's phone using a WiFi network, like you might be using at a coffee shop. The attack turns off SSL on the victim's phone, allowing the hacker to sniff your exposed traffic and steal your email credentials.

Trust Digital posted a pair of YouTube videos demonstrating the above attacks, which you can view here and here.

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Posted 11/25/08 at 05:44:53 PM by Andy Salisbury

Your data means a lot to you, and Lenovo is looking to add one more layer of security to it with their latest concoction – a remote disable that you activate using a text message. The system, called Lenovo Constant Secure Remote Disable will be rolling out as early as 2009.

The remote disable allows anyone with a lost or stolen laptop to simply send a text message that will completely lock down the computer. According to Stacy Cannady, Lenovo’s Product Manager of Security, the computer waits to be turned on by the would-be thief, then locks itself down and uses this time to encrypt the hard drive. Once the machine is recovered all it takes is a “resurrection” password to completely unlock the whole thing.

According to Cannady, “The limitation here is that you have to have a WAN card in the PC and you must be paying a data plan for it. If that is true, when someone steals the PC, you can whip out your cell phone and send a message to your PC, wherever it is, and when the PC gets that message, it will shutoff at that moment. The only way to get it back is to type in the resurrection code.”

Now, let’s just hope that once this technology comes full circle to the Twitter using public, they don’t get the two mixed up!

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Posted 10/31/08 at 03:53:34 PM by Alex Castle

Google’s adding yet another feature to Gmail’s formidable (and sometimes frivolous) arsenal. Starting soon, you’ll be able to send SMS messages to your friends’ phones from Gmail’s built-in Chat feature.

When it’s made available, you’ll need to enable the feature in the “Labs” tab of the Gmail settings page. Once that’s done, you’ll be able to send messages to people’s phones by simply entering a phone number into the Chat search box and selecting the SMS option.

When a person receives a text from a Gmail user, it’ll show up as coming from a phone number with a 406 area code. The first time you send a Gmail SMS, you’ll be assigned one of the thousands of numbers Google has reserved, and all messages you send in the future will come from the same number. The receiver can reply to the text and it’ll show up in Gmail chat.

The feature should become available today or in the next few days. When it does, will you use it? Let us know after the jump.

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Posted 04/02/07 at 12:55:07 AM by Will Smith

Twitter is the first thing Will's ever regularly used text messages for, and he's pretty certain that he likes it

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