Purchased an all new Nexus 5 Android smartphone? Recently, a new security exploit started affecting many Nexus smartphones with Flash SMS. This Vulnerability has been discovered by Bogdan Alecu, can force the device to remotely reboot, freeze, and face connectivity issues. For all those who wanted to know in detail, Flash SMS is a special class of message which by default is not stored and also doesn’t give any audio alert. These are nothing but the system alerts most of the times. In case of the Nexus exploit, the user of Nexus devices receive multiple messages without your dismissal and device behaves in erratic ways. As of now the non-Nexus smartphones appears to be safe.
No worries, there is a way out to get saved from this attack with Class0Firewall Android App.
What is Class0Firewall App?
Class0Firewall is basically a Proof of Concept (PoC) which protects user against an SMS attack which is discovered by Bogdan Alecu.
The message threshold is set for messages per minute which are allowed to be received in the device. If the number of messages exceeds the defined value, then the message gets dropped by Class 0 Firewall, hence saving the device from any attacks.
Download Class0Firewall from Google PLAY Store for blocking the Class 0 Messages. Though, the Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 might just receive a fix for this attack, we are not sure if Samsung will push any OTA update for its Galaxy Nexus smartphone as it has stopped receiving any OTA update for a while now.
Based on the inputs and the testing, this vulnerability appears to only affect the Nexus line running on all versions of stock Android through to the current release of KitKat.
Do let us know in the comments section just in case if you have any queries or issues as we will try to fix them asap.
Source: DefCamp, Class0Firewall (Play Store)
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