Fake Cell Phone Towers Discovered

Rather than offering you cellphone service, the towers appear to be connecting to nearby phones, bypassing their encryption, and either tapping calls or reading texts.


http://finance.yahoo.com/news/mysterious-fake-cellphone-towers-intercepting-162645809.html

 

How can nobody know who put these things up... Somebody bought or leased the land, somebody brought in guys and equipment to put it up. They didn't just appear overnight.

 

Wow. How strange.

This was the most telling part of the article to me (in regards to who put them up)- "Although it is unclear who owns the towers, ESD found that several of them were located near U.S. military bases.

"Whose interceptor is it? Who are they, that's listening to calls around military bases? Is it just the U.S. military, or are they foreign governments doing it? The point is: we don't really know whose they are," Goldsmith said to Popular Science.

It's probably not the NSA — that agency can tap all it wants without the need for bogus towers, VentureBeat reported:"

 

I'm surprised they didn't just hide the wiretapping technology within real cell phone towers. They could have gotten away with it a lot more inconspicuously. Common sense doesn't seem to exist even with our oppressors.

 

I read about this earlier today. Wtf, is all I can think to say

 

Reason #532 that I don't have a cell phone.....

 

duckduckgo it unless you want google to make a record of your search, aggregate it with other data, and then sell data use to commercial interests

 

I think we need to re-enter the topic of what encryption is. You don't' just decide " hey I think I'm gonna bypass that" it doesn't work that way.

A cellular device may try to handshake with a certain tower, but it should not be possible to handshake without encryption, and if it is then that's a serious security flaw on the part of the cellphone manufacturer and the models affected should be recalled.

I guess it's kinda like sending de-authentication requests on a wireless network, making the access point (in this case cell tower) unavailable and forcing a handshake with the attacker. In any case the protocols and standards involved should be seriously looked at and reconsidered, and overhauled, and cellular devices should be made to reject any unencrypted connection on the hardware level.

This is why open source code and firmware is such a great idea, it's hard to trust something if you can't look at the code ...

 

Cropcircles!

 

i think we all might need new tinfoil hats

 

the solutions for this is pretty fuckin obvious, but if people wanna be paranoid, then so be it.

i just get annoyed at this mentality, oh the governenment the fuckin hackers, the boogey man can do all this stuff and theres nothing you can do blah blah, actually there is something that can be done. there's a mechanism to how this shit works, no such thing as magic. if an exploit is found then a patch is released, if no mechanism can be found, then it probably really isn't happening

why has no one set up an antenna at home, and tried to duplicate this effect on a computer?

 

When you smart guys get it figured out, let me know.

 

lol

Yeah, I am sure you've got it figured out.

 

Did you ever consider that maybe cell phones deliberately come with these "security flaws" to make it easier for the government to listen in on you?

 

I guess if you do enough drugs then the answers come naturally...

 

That would mean that there's stuff going on that shouldn't be, and that we've all been lied to, and that's just crazy talk.

 

what Pressed_Rat is referring to is a backdoor

read RFCs and be free .. ow
http://lte-epc.blogspot.com/2009/11/lte-control-plane-protocol-stacks.html


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edit: ahem GTP C

see:
- GPRS Tunnelling Protocol for the control plane (GTP C): This protocol tunnels signalling messages between SGSN and S GW (S4).