GPRS billing scam revealed

Spreading like wildfire is an item from Guy Kewney's NewsWireless.net about a vulnerability in the General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) which enables an unauthorized service provider to "borrow" your IP address and then bill you for their service: "...a company obtains IP addresses that the GPRS operators own, in the 'cellular pool' and start pinging those addresses. When one of them responds, the scam operator knows that a user has been assigned the address. And, unbelievably, there was nothing to stop them simply providing services direct to that IP address - and taking the money out of the GPRS billing system to pay for it... Getting the IP address list costs the crook no more than it takes to log onto the GPRS network with a data call, and getting assigned an address by a perfectly standard DHCP server inside the operator's network... The problem isn't limited to GPRS. Any mobile network that is internally trusted - and that includes next-level technology like UMTS 3G networks - will face similar threats when linking its internal, trusting network to the free-for-all that is the Internet..."