Saturday, July 21, 2001

Firefighter's phone lines disrupted because of a SMS hoax Phone lines of the firefighters in all regions of Slovakia were severely overloaded for two days as tens of thousands calls were made to it. The cause was a hoax SMS spreading in the network of one of the GSM operators stating that it is possible to make free calls using this number. The GSM operator itself also had minor problems in some areas. Despite coverage in main news the calls continued also the next day. Many people apparently did not recognize that the number is an emergency one and blindly called it. Even more people forwarded the message to all friends without thinking of it or trying it. Risk 1: You don't need any mail client executing scripts to spread some piece of info faster than the system is able to handle. A plain old human stupidity fully suffices and in this case endangered human lives. Don't assume that if one is intelligent enough to use services such as SMS, he/she won't respond to this kind of hoax. That particular operator has less than 700 000 customers, the number of calls made was quoted as tens of thousands. Go figure... Risk 2: If the originator was smart enough to use web-to-SMS gateway via some anonymizer, he is practically untraceable (the individual would be facing 8 to 10 years in prison). The intent of the callers and forwarders will be much harder to prove and our justice already is overloaded enough, so they probably don't have to fear much. [Stanislav Meduna via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 55] 0:00 # G!

Banking and Internet broadcast technologies A local Internet-based bank (a joint venture of South Africa's largest ISP and a local banking group) ran into a spot of trouble with a mass e-mailing list of a sister company, MoneyMax. MoneyMax provides online securities trading and securities-related information to the bank's customers. It appears the wires got crossed, and confidential information in response to one person's credit-card application made it onto MoneyMax's daily financial newsletter. Thankfully, somebody noticed after mailing to about 2% of the list, and pulled the plug on the mailserver. [The e-mail apology entitled "Please delete previous Moneymax Newsletter" blamed an "unforeseen software error", and included the customary "Measures have been taken to ensure that it will not happen again." PGN-ed] [Daniel Chalef via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 54] 0:00 # G!