Party Vibe

@tryptameanie 977779 wrote:

https://thehackernews.com/2015/10/how-to-hack-smartphone.html

and at the moment there is no trace of the guy who told it the BBC?

@General Lighting 977789 wrote:

suspect only some types of phone would be vulnerable. Not sure if they would be able to do that on my Nokia 100 or the Nokia 20 fixed data terminal; especially when they tend to default to GSM900 and I have at least two monitoring devices for transmissions in that frequency range..

Also doing any of this will run down the accu of the target device if not carefully planned; they can’t defeat the laws of physics.

A BBC report about Hacking Team had an interview with some detective from UK where he himself let on they had to use these tools sparingly or their effects became obvious.

Why can’t they use it against GSM900 phones??? (ur Nokia 100 indicates also GSM1800) [ATTACH=CONFIG]154857[/ATTACH]

and what is? and would help? your two monitoring devices for transmissions in that frequency range??????????

and last question, even without accu, are they able to download the messages, phone numbers, photos…???

These kinds of GSM 900 or 1800 phones rarely have the functionality to do anything other than make phone calls /send texts – although some later models were smarter the functions varied from manufacturer rather than being standard as with Android

GSM phones emit a strong pulsed signal with a bandwidth of about 200 KHz – in the 1990s it was a nuisance if using one near any audio equipment such as in a radio studio or your hi fi system – as it could get into the audio circuits and be heard as a rough rasping noise upon the loudspeakers.

this is the cheap frequency counter; it is monitoring a UHF transmitter at 459,050 Mhz in this video but if placed near GSM equipment it shows frequencies around 900 MHz [as you would expect it to]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1av_toZ1UVQ

the other device is a similarly priced USB dongle that is sold for receiving TV but most people buy it for monitoring other signals .

With open source software it can do similar stuff to equipment that costs €20 000…

the only way cops/feds can get at the contents of the phone memory without making it transmit is by physically seizing the device and connecting it to equipment that can directly access its chips [an enhanced version of the equipment used to upload the firmware to the phone for testing and debugging].

our local cops (Suffolk Constabulary) do have one of these devices, its existence is no secret and was even mentioned on their website a few years ago as a warning to people not to use their mobile phones for illegal purposes although its no coincidence their HQ is literally a few hundred metres away from the British Telecom research centre (which all the worlds mobile companies have links with).

if you mean the phone memory downloader no one can remember its name; not even many of the profs who helped build it.

that isn’t even for secrecy reasons; special projects like that usually get allocated an obscure code of letters and numbers and this can change even between similar devices – if Northumbria and Durham had ordered one theirs may have a different model number.

Individual components also change as manufacturers can make them obsolete surprisingly quickly – for instance the transmitter board in the above video has an RF22 or RF22M chip on it but the chip itself is marked RF22S and these boards are becoming hard to get – (which is annoying as others don’t have a PLL (frequency controller) that can tune up to 459.050 MHz and there isn’t yet an easy to build Arduino shield forthe new chips.

( in Britain we can use for lots of short range gadgets with more power than 433 MHz).

End users are often skilled professionals in their field (detectives, nurses etc) but they just see the device as a “clever box for a computer that reads the mobile phone data / transmits signals from the nurse call system”. Even if you explain in fairly simple terms how it works and what it should be called they might understand about 30% of it – and/or mix up its name with some other piece of computer equipment.

So for maintenance purposes it is easier to just put some code number like SFZ-U801-A on the case (using the pager transmitter as an example) and the end users/their ICT helpdesk just need to remember the code number when calling for support.

Then 6 months later another client asks “can you make us one of those?” – you find that the components from the first batch are obsolete and you must use others; and when the device is installed this client says “every time it transmits the picture on the TV in the staff room breaks up into blocks” so a different antenna or RF filter has to be included.

So this one might be SFZ-U801-B but in the intervening time you are likely to have also worked on 5 more other projects and often have to check the project documents to work out which device is which (assuming the documents actually exist and are accurate).

And people wonder why many engineers still smoke 😉