A SMS vulnerability has been found in some Google Nexus phones that can force the phone to restart or to become unstable.
First discovered by Bogdan Alecu, a system admin at Dutch IT company Levi9, the vulnerability affects the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and LG’s Nexus 4 and 5 that are running at least Android 4.0 ICS.
By spamming a Google Nexus phone with Flash SMS—you know, those text messages that just appears on top of everything without any notice—the device will start to behave oddly. In many cases, such abnormal behavior starts with the phone rebooting and, if the SIM is PIN-locked, being unable to connect to a network.
Though temporary, the vulnerability will still prevent the device from receiving calls and messages, as well as connect to the Internet. Unless they check up on their phone, users won’t notice that their devices are under a denial-of-service attack. Flash messages, after all, come with no audio notification.