That's why I've carefully avoided becoming wealthy - I'd hate to find out the hard way that I was worth more dead than alive So cell phones aren't secure. Is that news? What, do we need legislation to protect us? What good will legislation do when a criminals don't care about legislation and b governments can and will insert clauses allowing them to bypass legislation.
You have to take care of yourself in this world. Considering the federal government in the U. After delivering and installing some Trojan via an unauthorised service SMS they claimed to be able to have a remote access to the handset including listening to conversations, copying contacts etc. And no I have no connection to the company other than one of it's founders used to be the MD of a company I worked for.
From a software perspective this is extremely easy. However inbuilt OS security in all of the mobile OSs I know mean the chances of such malicious code being installed by a 3rd party is extremely small. That said it is very easy for the network opperator to silently install whatever they want over the network. Given how they rolled over for the previous federal wiretapping scandle nothing would surprised me Sprint started supporting FOTA right after my departure so I can only guess at what the process looks like from the user's end, but I imagine that even a normal update with modal progress dialog would be dismissed as "just another update or something.
Hackers only need your phone number to eavesdrop on calls, read texts, track you
Mobile phones are major security and privacy holes, and things will get much worse before they get better. I discussed this with a colleague who was once in cellular customer service. Remember car phones? I'm talking about cellular phones permanently installed in vehicles. Some of them were manufactured and installed with an "auto-answer" feature that was meant to be safer and more convenient for a driver. But at least one model had a disconcerting problem: it would answer a call without ringing.
In at least one case, a subscriber called customer service complaining that he was caught in some unauthorized extra-marital activity, because "that blankety-blank phone answered on it's own. So, what we need is a clamshell holster for mobile phones with electromagnetic shielding all around, good quality acoustic insulation to attenuate voice leakage, and an internal device situated right at the phone's microphone pickup that feeds it a random electronic yodel?
Did I miss anything? Supposedly a "suicide by hanging", but suspicious remarks were made before his death. Roy: Yes. You forgot the easiest way to eavesdrop: 1. Wait for your target to walk by you while he talks on his cellphone. Listen :. Roy I would rather prefere to see the spread of an open source cellphone platform s , like qtopia, tuxphone, openmoko etc. Exactly, but a very familiar problem everyone's favorite OS is more likely to repeat than not with a proprietary network.
Are consumers demanding an open phone, or a service that makes it easy to separate client from the target see my comment above -- imagine phones designed to not be tied directly to an owner. Ironically, the limitations of the mobile platform could help reduce the complexities and thus enable exposure of vulnerabilities, but instead they might also be a perfect excuse for shortcuts and control gaps driven by "market" forces. I read the actual evidence referenced by the original story and didn't see any evidence to support the article's claims.
In fact, it seems clear to me that some other kind of equipment must have been used in this case, because the opinion talks about it working even when the cellphone was turned off. I don't believe any cellphone out there can run a program while turned off or do anything else, much less transmit, without hardare hacking.
Therefore, contrary to the article, it must've involved a physical hack of the cellphone such the transmitting battery suggested earlier in the thread. The original article also implies that a "roving bug" mentioned in the legal documents is the technique for turning cellphones remotely into bugs. That's rather likelier to be legal language referring to the "roving tap" authority needed to establish mobile or otherwise especially intrusive taps under a mechanism established by the Patriot Act.
The legal language around the term seems to support that. So unless all sources of power e. In fact, mobiles are often designed to allow "always available" functionality with default-enable across multiple networks even though you might press the "off" button and save some power. I assume they atleast do code signing or something similar to protect from unauthorized access, but imagine the payoff from pulling this off: You can basically blackmail entire societies with the threat to render their cellphones inoperable.
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Unfortunately, "Off" is very rarely off these days. As was mentioned earlier, most phones will happily turn themselves on if there is enough battery left to trigger alarms etc. Periodically, I'd get the phone to add a. My phone has a 1GB flash card - that's a lot of voice recording time Why bother, when it seems most people do not change the default PIN on their voicemail?
Even when they think they are being hacked!! Ref the British 'investigative' reporter who has been found guilty of eavesdropping on voicemail accounts of Buckingham Palace staff. At mw of power, it would not get warm or anything. A lot of current phones have speakerphones on the outside. They are worse at filtering out background noise, on purpose, and are on the outside for clamshells so would make excellent bugs. I assume any device that has access to power is more or less on. If I was in a criminal enterprise I would pull the battery at certain times. You know, it's amazing how perfect we assume the government and large organizations are when we're being paranoid.
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Add GPS and stir, briskly. The phone also detects when it is plugged into a charger. Funny that the latest Motorolas don't let you use unauthorized chargers, isn't it? A convenient time to do the upload -- or just time-share the data stream during a voice call. The classy approach is to have shielded small lockers with white noise in the vestibule of your operations area. You forward your mobile phone to one of the "guest" lines, and put it in the locker. A thought for your privacy at home, too. Except that your local telco is an order of magnitude easier to tap :.
This is so old Basic principle is propably 50 years old, but this technique told in article has been in use around 10 years. Such things are already fairly widly available, go into any cellphone test area say Cingulars in Redmond Town Center for instance and you will see the clam shell cases some have both speakers for the mic and mics for the earpiece so you can plug them into achostic tests sets. If you want to buy one new go to the Rhode and Schwarz web site.
That just demonstrates that they can do smart things, not that they don't take shortcuts and make mistakes. What about OTA? The older style cheap phones had a mechanical switch which disconnected the phone on hook. These are probably the most secure. We have done for the CryptoPhone a lot of work on the operating system. We remove attack vectors, based on a user-selectable OS-security profile that essentiall balances features vs. All of these are removed in even the lowest security level the user can select on a CryptoPhone.
Other potential attack vectors are removed on higher security levels. Feel free to mail me if you want more details. Speaking of defensive measures, I have done some reasearch on the topic and discovered Russian LEAs are so much very concerned with this cellphone feature. They have been concerned since the first cellies hit the market. And they have developed a countermeasure - a relatively soundproof holster with a tiny speaker, which hisses white noise into the cellie's microphone.
It turns on whenever it detects transmission attempts on the side of cellie, so if you basicaly put a turned on mobile in there, it will be immediately jammed by noise and will be jammed untill you bother to turn off the phone. This approach placing a TURNED ON cellie in "cocoon jammer" seems nice because you, on one side, effectively jam the microphone even when adversary runs this spycell malware, no sound but a menacing hiss will be recorded and, on the other hand , are still able to recieve calls, as communication with network is intact use vibration, as the holster is designed to be effectively soundproof.
In my opinion there are not so many issues while a lot of software for voice encryption over GSM are spreading. There are dozen of windows mobile based www.
I also had an experience with my old brick Nokia phone a couple of years ago. One day I received a message from my cell provider informing me that the menu options on my phone had been 'upgraded'; I checked and they had. There was no 'If it's OK by you' or anything like that. It just happened.
Cellphone surveillance - Wikipedia
Who knows what else thay can do with your mobile these days? Someone close to me has had this happen to them. I was present when one such eaves-dropping was apparently made and the text of part of someone's speech was relayed. Reading the above I had an idea - just buy one of those stupid-looking light-up antennas so one would likely know when it was transmitting otherwise surreptitiously.