Comments on: How can the phones of upto 3000 people be hacked but Operators not know anything of it?

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 18:30:57 +0000

good article on this is here http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/14/notw_privacy_scandal_opinion/. Neither the phone nor the network were hacked, those involved were able to access voice mailboxes.
By default most voicemail boxes are easy to access, more so than internet email even (which can be very easy in the new world of open social networks – as Sarah Palin found out).
Most operators use default pin codes for mailboxes, which many people don’t bother to change (they’re probably not even aware of the pin since they don’t normally need to use it when accessing vmail from your own phone).
what are the lessons from this? existing mobile networks are probably secure enough, if you are concerned about security then make sure that you take steps to protect your assets, which can vary from the minimum (change your voicemail PIN) to the more paranoid such as service like cellcrypt

By: Dave Birch

Dave Birch — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 21:30:14 +0000

“”It raises the question of the very buoyant market for confidential information in this country and the biggest buyers are the media.”"
And the government, of course…
http://www.dofonline.co.uk/tax/hmrc-admits-paying-for-stolen-data.html

By: Benjamin

Benjamin — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:07:43 +0000

Phones aren’t safe anymore for a very long time.
I have a non-nonsense teacher claiming that for him intercepting a call, only the first 3 seconds of a phone conversation are safe.
He does this by placing an antenna, playing Operator, and decrypting the call with a simple Linux cluster which he happens to own.