DOS attack on Blackberry...

Today I think that I discovered a potential denial-of-service (DOS) attack on the Blackberry.

I was sent an email with a 1MB attachment, but the MIME encoding didn't work properly. This meant that the message body itself was massive (the Base64 encoded attachment).

For some reason, despite the Blackberry's chunking of large emails into small pieces, the mail seemed to stump the device. The sand-timer appeared and just kept twirling away. I had to stop it by taking the battery out (i.e. drastic re-start).

I couldn't find a way round the problem. Trying to delete the message caused the same "freezed" response. I simply had to wait for a long time before it processed the command.

Now, had someone flooded my inbox with such large messages, it would have been very hard to recover without losing a lot of hair and patience.


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