It's certainly not unheard of for memory corruption issues to exist in SMS handling code - see http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2009-2204 http:

It's certainly not unheard of for memory corruption issues to exist in SMS handling code - see http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2009-2204 http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2009-2204 . There's also a pretty wide remote exploit vector in MMS - you have an entire TCP + HTTP stack, image decoder, and render mechanism to exploit in that case. I don't know of any published MMS exploits in the wild for any recent phones, but that's not to say it's impossible. I do agree that the article as a whole sounds like 90s/early-2000s paranoia combined with the standard glorification of "cyberpunks," though - it's just not the "iPhone via text" anecdote that's raising red flags.