Don't fret over SIM vulnerability...unless you have an older dumb phone.

Talk about a lot of hype for nothing.  News reports have been spreading quickly about how possibly 750M mobile phones may be vulnerable to a simple, 2-minute hack that only requires sending a certain type of SMS to a mobile phone.  According to the researcher, about 1/4 of phones using the older DES encryption technique via a phone's SIM card, are ultimately vulnerable.

The backward calculation means that there are about 3B phones out there still using DES SIMs.  Sounds like a lot of phones, but late last year, there were about 6B mobile phones in usage around the world.  With 3G phones (and newer), you wouldn't have DES in your SIM card.  Earlier this year, smart phone shipments surpassed feature / dumb phones.  If you were to buy a new feature / dumb phone, it'd be designed to operate on 3G.  In order to be vulnerable to this hack, you'd have to own a relatively older mobile phone that didn't utilize a SIM card used for 3G / 4G.

Don't worry, be happy!

That doesn't mean your phone isn't vulnerable to other hacks yet to be discovered, but at least in this case, you can stop worrying.