Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by cmn32480 on Saturday November 05 2016, @01:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the brought-to-you-soon-by-the-NSA dept.

Wired recently published a story that says something about the state of stealthy cell phone snooping:

Julian Oliver has for years harbored a strange obsession with spotting poorly disguised cellphone towers, those massive roadside antennae draped in fake palm fronds to impersonate a tree, or even hidden as spoofed lamp posts and flag poles. The incognito base stations gave him another, more mischievous idea. What about a far better-disguised cell tower that could sit anonymously in office, invisibly hijacking cellphone conversations and texts?

Earlier this week, the Berlin-based hacker-artist unveiled the result: An entirely boring-looking Hewlett Packard printer that also secretly functions as a rogue GSM cell base station, tricking your phone into connecting to it rather than your phone carrier's tower, effectively intercepting your calls and text messages. [...]

Oliver's fake printer, which he calls the Stealth Cell Tower, could potentially eavesdrop on the voice calls and SMS messages of any phone that's fooled into automatically connecting to it. Since it sits indoors near its victims, Oliver says it can easily overpower the signal of real, outdoor cell towers. But instead of spying, the printer merely starts a text message conversation with the phone, pretending to be an unidentified contact with a generic message like "Come over when you're ready," or the more playful "I'm printing the details for you now." If the confused victim writes back, the printer spits out their response on paper as a creepy proof of concept. It's also programmed to make calls to connected phones and, if the owner answers, to play an mp3 of the Stevie Wonder song "I Just Called to Say I Love You." After five minutes, the printer drops its connection with the phone and allows it to reconnect to a real cell tower.

While Oliver's device is fairly benign, what's frightening about this is the ease Oliver was able to hide the snooping hardware. The article contains a picture showing the snooper's circuit board mounted in the printer, showing just how small the board is and demonstrating just how easy it would be to hide one of these potentially evil gadgets.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 05 2016, @05:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 05 2016, @05:55PM (#422888)

    In the mid 1970s high school electronics class, I took an old portable am/fm transistor radio and replaced the guts with a custom built audio transmitter. It looked the same on the outside but would transmit audio to a nearby radio receiver. Definitely better than what clockboy did with his suitcase alarm clock a few years ago. To sum it up... There could be anything hiding inside.