Entries Tagged "phones"

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Maybe the Phone System Surveillance Vulnerabilities Will Be Fixed

It seems that the FCC might be fixing the vulnerabilities in SS7 and the Diameter protocol:

On March 27 the commission asked telecommunications providers to weigh in and detail what they are doing to prevent SS7 and Diameter vulnerabilities from being misused to track consumers’ locations.

The FCC has also asked carriers to detail any exploits of the protocols since 2018. The regulator wants to know the date(s) of the incident(s), what happened, which vulnerabilities were exploited and with which techniques, where the location tracking occurred, and ­ if known ­ the attacker’s identity.

This time frame is significant because in 2018, the Communications Security, Reliability, and Interoperability Council (CSRIC), a federal advisory committee to the FCC, issued several security best practices to prevent network intrusions and unauthorized location tracking.

I have written about this over the past decade.

Posted on April 5, 2024 at 7:00 AM • View Comments

Canadian Citizen Gets Phone Back from Police

After 175 million failed password guesses, a judge rules that the Canadian police must return a suspect’s phone.

[Judge] Carter said the investigation can continue without the phones, and he noted that Ottawa police have made a formal request to obtain more data from Google.

“This strikes me as a potentially more fruitful avenue of investigation than using brute force to enter the phones,” he said.

Posted on January 18, 2024 at 7:02 AM • View Comments

Details of a Computer Banking Scam

This is a longish video that describes a profitable computer banking scam that’s run out of call centers in places like India. There’s a lot of fluff about glitterbombs and the like, but the details are interesting. The scammers convince the victims to give them remote access to their computers, and then that they’ve mistyped a dollar amount and have received a large refund that they didn’t deserve. Then they convince the victims to send cash to a drop site, where a money mule retrieves it and forwards it to the scammers.

I found it interesting for several reasons. One, it illustrates the complex business nature of the scam: there are a lot of people doing specialized jobs in order for it to work. Two, it clearly shows the psychological manipulation involved, and how it preys on the unsophisticated and vulnerable. And three, it’s an evolving tactic that gets around banks increasingly flagging blocking suspicious electronic transfers.

Posted on March 22, 2021 at 6:15 AM • View Comments

Robocall Results from a Telephony Honeypot

A group of researchers set up a telephony honeypot and tracked robocall behavior:

NCSU researchers said they ran 66,606 telephone lines between March 2019 and January 2020, during which time they said to have received 1,481,201 unsolicited calls—even if they never made their phone numbers public via any source.

The research team said they usually received an unsolicited call every 8.42 days, but most of the robocall traffic came in sudden surges they called “storms” that happened at regular intervals, suggesting that robocallers operated using a tactic of short-burst and well-organized campaigns.

In total, the NCSU team said it tracked 650 storms over 11 months, with most storms being of the same size.

Research paper. USENIX talk. Slashdot thread.

Posted on August 17, 2020 at 6:22 AM • View Comments

Collecting and Selling Mobile Phone Location Data

The Wall Street Journal has an article about a company called Anomaly Six LLC that has an SDK that’s used by “more than 500 mobile applications.” Through that SDK, the company collects location data from users, which it then sells.

Anomaly Six is a federal contractor that provides global-location-data products to branches of the U.S. government and private-sector clients. The company told The Wall Street Journal it restricts the sale of U.S. mobile phone movement data only to nongovernmental, private-sector clients.

[…]

Anomaly Six was founded by defense-contracting veterans who worked closely with government agencies for most of their careers and built a company to cater in part to national-security agencies, according to court records and interviews.

Just one of the many Internet companies spying on our every move for profit. And I’m sure they sell to the US government; it’s legal and why would they forgo those sales?

Posted on August 11, 2020 at 6:00 AM • View Comments

BlackBerry Phone Cracked

Australia is reporting that a BlackBerry device has been cracked after five years:

An encrypted BlackBerry device that was cracked five years after it was first seized by police is poised to be the key piece of evidence in one of the state’s longest-running drug importation investigations.

In April, new technology “capabilities” allowed authorities to probe the encrypted device….

No details about those capabilities.

Posted on August 3, 2020 at 11:54 AM • View Comments

Hacking a Power Supply

This hack targets the firmware on modern power supplies. (Yes, power supplies are also computers.)

Normally, when a phone is connected to a power brick with support for fast charging, the phone and the power adapter communicate with each other to determine the proper amount of electricity that can be sent to the phone without damaging the device­—the more juice the power adapter can send, the faster it can charge the phone.

However, by hacking the fast charging firmware built into a power adapter, Xuanwu Labs demonstrated that bad actors could potentially manipulate the power brick into sending more electricity than a phone can handle, thereby overheating the phone, melting internal components, or as Xuanwu Labs discovered, setting the device on fire.

Research paper, in Chinese.

Posted on July 21, 2020 at 6:09 AM • View Comments

EncroChat Hacked by Police

French police hacked EncroChat secure phones, which are widely used by criminals:

Encrochat’s phones are essentially modified Android devices, with some models using the “BQ Aquaris X2,” an Android handset released in 2018 by a Spanish electronics company, according to the leaked documents. Encrochat took the base unit, installed its own encrypted messaging programs which route messages through the firm’s own servers, and even physically removed the GPS, camera, and microphone functionality from the phone. Encrochat’s phones also had a feature that would quickly wipe the device if the user entered a PIN, and ran two operating systems side-by-side. If a user wanted the device to appear innocuous, they booted into normal Android. If they wanted to return to their sensitive chats, they switched over to the Encrochat system. The company sold the phones on a subscription based model, costing thousands of dollars a year per device.

This allowed them and others to investigate and arrest many:

Unbeknownst to Mark, or the tens of thousands of other alleged Encrochat users, their messages weren’t really secure. French authorities had penetrated the Encrochat network, leveraged that access to install a technical tool in what appears to be a mass hacking operation, and had been quietly reading the users’ communications for months. Investigators then shared those messages with agencies around Europe.

Only now is the astonishing scale of the operation coming into focus: It represents one of the largest law enforcement infiltrations of a communications network predominantly used by criminals ever, with Encrochat users spreading beyond Europe to the Middle East and elsewhere. French, Dutch, and other European agencies monitored and investigated “more than a hundred million encrypted messages” sent between Encrochat users in real time, leading to arrests in the UK, Norway, Sweden, France, and the Netherlands, a team of international law enforcement agencies announced Thursday.

EncroChat learned about the hack, but didn’t know who was behind it.

Going into full-on emergency mode, Encrochat sent a message to its users informing them of the ongoing attack. The company also informed its SIM provider, Dutch telecommunications firm KPN, which then blocked connections to the malicious servers, the associate claimed. Encrochat cut its own SIM service; it had an update scheduled to push to the phones, but it couldn’t guarantee whether that update itself wouldn’t be carrying malware too. That, and maybe KPN was working with the authorities, Encrochat’s statement suggested (KPN declined to comment). Shortly after Encrochat restored SIM service, KPN removed the firewall, allowing the hackers’ servers to communicate with the phones once again. Encrochat was trapped.

Encrochat decided to shut itself down entirely.

Lots of details about the hack in the article. Well worth reading in full.

The UK National Crime Agency called it Operation Venetic: “46 arrests, and £54m criminal cash, 77 firearms and over two tonnes of drugs seized so far.”

Many more news articles. EncroChat website. Slashdot thread. Hacker News threads.

EDITED TO ADD (7/14): Some people are questioning the official story. I don’t know.

Posted on July 3, 2020 at 10:39 AM • View Comments

Wallpaper that Crashes Android Phones

This is interesting:

The image, a seemingly innocuous sunset (or dawn) sky above placid waters, may be viewed without harm. But if loaded as wallpaper, the phone will crash.

The fault does not appear to have been maliciously created. Rather, according to developers following Ice Universe’s Twitter thread, the problem lies in the way color space is handled by the Android OS.

The image was created using the RGB color space to display image hues, while Android 10 uses the sRGB color space protocol, according to 9to5Google contributor Dylan Roussel. When the Android phone cannot properly convert the Adobe RGB image, it crashes.

Posted on June 3, 2020 at 6:11 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.