First check mobile botnet

Everyone is accustomed to the DoS attacks on the Internet and they know how to do it: thousands of infected PCs form a botnet and at a certain moment start simultaneously bombarding with requests the specified web server. That does not maintain loading and falls off. As it turned out, this DoS attack algorithm is applicable not only on the Internet, but also in cellular networks. On the experiment of engineers from the Georgia Institute of Technology writes New Scientist.

In the course of the experiment, it was checked what size the botnet should be in order to overwhelm the average cellular provider. For the experience they took a server with a database of the Home Location Register (HLR) type, which each operator has. There are stored SIM-card numbers and other information about each subscriber. It turned out that a botnet of 12,000 phones can block up to 93% of traffic (voice and SMS) based on a million subscribers.

Mobile botnets exist so far only in theory, although there is information that hackers have already tested the viability of an idea in practice. The nightmare may well come to life if some homogeneous environment becomes widespread on mobile devices or there are many phones of the same model. In this case, one virus can quickly infect thousands of devices at once.