Some time today, the GPRS world will reveal that it has a security vulnerability which has seen an undisclosed number of its customers ripped off. They've been trapped into connecting to malicious content servers, by hackers penetrating the billing system.

The first international phone company to admit that they have installed a solution - one offered by Check Point - will be the German phone provider, E-Plus.

The scam is called "the over-billing attack." It works quite simply because of a link from the Internet world - unregulated - to the normally tightly regulated GSM planet. "Network administrators face an exponential onslaught of attacks that to date have traditionally been confined to the world of wire line data," was the summary from Check Point.

There are lots of potential issues, but the one which has forced the phone networks to acknowledge that there is a problem, is a scam where a company obtains IP addresses that the GPRS operators own, in the "cellular pool" and start pinging those addresses.

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