Significant Windows Phone exploit discovered

Khaled Salameh. From Winrumors.com:

The flaw works simply by sending an SMS to a Windows Phone user. Windows Phone 7.5 devices will reboot and the messaging hub will not open despite repeat attempts. We have tested the attack on a range of Windows Phone devices, including HTC’s TITAN and Samsung’s Focus Flash. Some devices were running the 7740 version of Windows Phone 7.5, others were on Mango RTM build 7720. The attack is not device specific and appears to be an issue with the way the Windows Phone messaging hub handles messages. The bug is also triggered if a user sends a Facebook chat message or Windows Live Messenger message to a recipient. The flaw appears to affect other aspects of the Windows Phone operating system too. If a user has pinned a friend as a live tile on their device and the friend posts a particular message on Facebook then the live tile will update and causes the device to lock up.

Tom Warren posted this update about 5 hours ago and has been in contact with Microsoft on the issue. This comes at an awkward time for the software company since it happened on the same day the top executive for the Windows Phone division (Andy Lees) was reassigned from that position. You can see a video that demonstrates the issue below: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnhzuKcDo6A Stay tuned to this site for more on the problem. I imagine Microsoft are making the development of a fix for this problem a top priority.]]>