BlackBerry at risk from denial of service attacks

Your BlackBerry could be caused to reboot simply by an attacker sending a malicious meeting request, according to security firm Secunia which has issued an advisory on the "non-critical" vulnerability in the popular wireless e-mail devices.18 Oct 2004

The problem, explains Secunia, is that Blackberry, made by Research In Motion, "doesn't handle meeting request messages with a string larger than 128KB in the 'Location' field." It says that "this causes the watchdog timer to reset the device".

According to RIM, this doesn't cause any loss of data. The problem only affects version 3.7 Service Pack 1 and some earlier versions. RIM has fixed the problem in version 3.8 of the handheld software.

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