Text message exploit can force your Nexus phone to reboot (updated)

Watch out if someone sends a flood of text messages to your Nexus phone -- they may be trying to break in or otherwise cause havoc. IT administrator Bogdan Alecu has discovered an Android bug that triggers exploitable behavior in the Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 whenever they're hit by a large volume of Class 0 SMS messages, or texts that aren't automatically stored on the phone. The denial of service attack usually forces the handset to reboot, but it can also disable the network connection (if temporarily) or crash the messaging app. Non-Nexus hardware appears to be safe, although Alecu notes that he hasn't had a chance to test a wide variety of gadgets. Regardless of the problem's scale, affected users will have to be cautious for a while; Google tells PCWorld that it's looking into the exploit, but there's no word on just when we can expect a patch.
 Now, Alecu has built an Android app called Class0Firewall himself to help Nexus users avoid such kind of an SMS attack. Nexus phone users can then set a threshold for the number of flash messages they can receive successively before blocking Class0 messages. Users can also set how long the messages will stay blocked.