But that's temporary, and phones can roam to other carriers. Bricking large swaths of consumer devices is a much more permanent effect, especially for non-phones (think modern cars, PoS terminals, and other devices with SIMs)
The carrier? You mean the company that actually routes and controls the emergency calls and other calls this DDoSes? And routes and controls all your data transfer and owns the cell towers?
I don't think carriers can be trusted per se, but if a carrier wants to interrupt your call, they can just kill the connection.
I trust mine not to brick my smartphone on purpose, at least. Especially not using methods that leave traces of what was done.
a bad actor can hack the carrier and brick the phones the same way the fridges were hacked and bricked few weeks ago
perhaps even a rogue employee
If that happens, I think the actors will have more serious things to hack around then phone-looping some poor souls
Why would you assume that? Being able to brick a substantial portion of citizen's devices would be of great value to many adversaries abroad.
They could just... take down the mobile network without having to go through the hassle of bricking your phone individually.
And it's not that hard, bring down a VPN or some core routing service.
But that's temporary, and phones can roam to other carriers. Bricking large swaths of consumer devices is a much more permanent effect, especially for non-phones (think modern cars, PoS terminals, and other devices with SIMs)
The carrier? You mean the company that actually routes and controls the emergency calls and other calls this DDoSes? And routes and controls all your data transfer and owns the cell towers?
How do you make calls without trusting them?