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Cell security!
Vulnerability Cellular phones are vulnerable to electronic eavesdropping, cellular spoofing and SMS jamming. Electronic eavesdropping is listening to or recording a cellular call without the permission or knowledge of the calling or receiving parties. Eavesdroppers accomplish this feat by using radio frequency scanners and other equipment to find and listen to the frequencies used by the devices. While communication privacy is a concern, it pales in front of cellular spoofing. Cellular spoofing (also known as cloning) is the process where a person provides false identification (about a cellular account) to the service provider with the intent to defraud. The earliest form of spoofing appeared several years ago in the mobile telephone industry. Eavesdroppers would scan the airwaves until they identified a mobile phone channel. They would then monitor the transmissions on these frequencies and wait for an account owner to request a call. Not only electronic eavesdropping and cellular spoofing, mobile phones also face the risk of crashing through SMS overwhelming. The idea of sending SMS or ‘text message’ to crash a mobile phone seemed a remote possibility until late last year when a Dutch security researcher revealed that it could be done through a computer program, called sms_client which sent malformed SMS messages from an Internet-connected PC to a target device. The SMS follows a certain format, which when modified might cause a phone to freeze or shutdown. It was revealed that a bug on the phone’s software caused the phone to freeze. The problem was solved when the SIM card of the affected phone was taken out and transferred to another phone that was bug-less. Useful devices A5/3: The GSM Association in October 2002 showed off a new security algorithm, known as A5/3 that provides users of GSM mobile phones with an even higher level of protection against eavesdropping than they have already. It ensures that even if a prospective attacker manages to pull a GSM phone call out of the radio waves, he will be unable to make sense of it. Cellphone detector: The detector traces mobile phone and 2-way radio transmissions. It sounds an alarm followed by a voice message requesting the user to turn their communication device off immediately. Compact and lightweight, the device is portable or can be easily wall-mounted. For convenience, it can be powered by batteries or AC adapter. It detects mobile phones and two-way radio transmissions in the continuous frequency range of 400 MHz to 2000 MHz, including all major communication formats in use around the world like GSM, CDMA, TDMA, PCS and two-way radio handsets. Cellphone jammer:
It sends out a blocking signal to stop any cellphone within a certain
range and at a Cellbuster:
When a signal is detected, for instance a person carrying a cellphone on
him in standby mode, a user selectable alarm is sounded. It is a device
that continuously scans for cellular phones. Once it detects that a
cellphone is switched on (up to 90 feet away), it alerts the user that
they must switch off their phone. |
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WIRELESS
communications, which is the use of cordless and cellular phones, has
grown by leaps and bounds in the past 10 years and become a booming $ 11
billion market. Unfortunately, it has also led to a huge security
problem, since the radio signals transmitted and received by these
devices can easily be intercepted, compromised and exploited. By 2004
there would be an estimated 1.5 billion cellphones around the world.