It shouldn’t be this easy, but apparently as few as 30 text messages sent to a Google Nexus phone at once is enough to make it restart or “act strangely”.
Attackers could force phones from Google’s Nexus line to reboot or fail to connect to the mobile Internet service by sending a large number of special SMS messages to them.
The issue was discovered by Bogdan Alecu, a system administrator at Dutch IT services company Levi9, and affects all Android 4.x firmware versions on Google Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4 and Nexus 5. Alecu will present the vulnerability Friday at the DefCamp security conference in Bucharest, Romania.