The guys over at WinRumors, have released a video showing what a simple text message can do to a Window Phone 7 device. It's not a pretty sight and can really ruin a persons day, by taking over your messaging hub until you do a hard reset.

“The flaw works simply by sending an SMS to a Windows Phone user. If the SMS contains a particular string of text then 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. The attack is not device specific and appears to be an issue with the way the Windows Phone messaging hub handles particular characters. The bug is also triggered if a user sends a Facebook chat message or Windows Live Messenger message to a recipient.”

Once your WP7 device reboots the Messaging hub no longer opens when you try and open the tile. Also, other functions of the devices OS seem to act up.

The “attacker” doesn’t even have to send it via text message, it can also be a Facebook message or Windows Live chat.

“If a user has pinned a friend as a live tile on their device and the friend posts a particular string of text on Facebook then the live tile will update and causes the device to lock up.”

Check out the video below to see the Windows Phone 7 bug in action.



The SMS issue has no known fix at the moment other than a hard reset, which would delete your entire mobile device and restore it to its factory settings. So make sure you have a full backup of your Windows mobile device just in case you do come across this SMS bug.

Some good news is, WinRumors has not made the specific line of text (used to cripple Windows Phone devices) available to the public. They also made sure to mention that it does not appear to be a security issue and only has to do with the way Windows Phones handles its messages.

This doesn’t mean that some other hacker can’t figure out the OS bug and spread it out to unsuspecting WP7 users, forcing them to hard reset their devices to factory settings. It would seem Microsoft is aware of the issue by now and hopefully fixing to roll out an update very soon. As soon as there is an update we will make sure to let you know.

Do you own a Windows Phone 7 device? Are you worried this text message bug will affect you? Let us know in the comments section down below.

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Tags: Win, windows 7, facebook, windows phone, issue, bug, attack, Vulnerability, text, txt, message, Messaging Hub, messaging, Win7, Wp7, Reboot, Re boot, disable, devices, mobile, mobile phone, Smartphone