Narrator: This is Science Today. A professor of computer science
and two graduate students at the University of California, Davis
has discovered vulnerabilities in cell phones that send or
receive multimedia files. The weakness was found in the
multimedia message service protocol, or MMS. Professor Hao Chen
says their study revealed the service could be exploited over
the Internet and potentially render thousands of phones useless.
Chen: They could build something called a hit list of vulnerable
phones that you can attack from MMS and they discovered that
they could surreptitiously drain the batteries of the phones on
a hit list. Our attack will try to prevent your phone from
entering the standby mode. Narrator: But does this type of study
give away too much information to the wrong people? Chen: It's
beneficial to disclose vulnerabilities to the public at an
appropriate time. So, an appropriate time would be after you
have notified the manufacturers or the service providers of the
vulnerabilities and give th