Cellular Hacking
Mobile phone technologies have also been used for intelligence gathering, in a process known as ‘cellular hacking’. Terrorists are now directly hacking into the smartphones of law enforcement officials working in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, thereby gaining access to classified information (Gold, 2011).
Reproduced from: www.med.miami.edu
The problem stems from how the handset has to authenticate itself to the network, but conversely, there is no provision in the 2G GSM standard or 3G standard for the network to authenticate itself to the mobile phone. Although the world is slowly shifting to 3G, most 3G phones contain the older 2G GSM technology, to preserve backward compatibility. This is where the terrorists come in. Smartphones are unable to differentiate between cellular radio signals from regular GSM basestations and the impersonator basestations set up by terrorists. A handset will simply lock on to the most powerful signals, such that terrorists can fool it into authenticating itself with the terrorists’ basestation, instead of the genuine one some distance away. All this can be done for a mere US$1,000, using a laptop and various open source software. It is possible to force smartphones to prefer 3G networks over 2G ones (thereby solving the problem), but this can be easily be countered by terrorists using 3G radio frequency jammers which can be cheaply and easily obtained.
Reproduced from: hackedgadgets.com
Once a phone has been subverted, text messages, email and mobile Web service data transmissions and email can be forwarded to the hacker, via a low-cost Internet telephony service (PAYG VoIP) paid for using an anonymous debit card. As the smartphone user is not charged for the data forwarding, he will be none the wiser. And even if the hacking is eventually discovered, it is difficult to investigate as there is no audit trail created for the authorities to track.
