Hacker Spoofs Cell Phone Tower to Intercept Calls

LAS VEGAS — A security researcher created a cell phone base station that tricks cell phones into routing their outbound calls through his device, allowing someone to intercept even encrypted calls in the clear.

The device tricks the phones into disabling encryption and records call details and content before they’re routed on their proper way through voice-over-IP.

The low-cost, home-brewed device, developed by researcher Chris Paget, mimics more expensive devices already used by intelligence and law enforcement agencies – called IMSI catchers – that can capture phone ID data and content. The devices essentially spoof a legitimate GSM tower and entice cell phones to send them data by emitting a signal that’s stronger than legitimate towers in the area.

“If you have the ability to deliver a reasonably strong signal, then those around are owned,” Paget said.

Paget’s system costs only about $1,500, as opposed to several hundreds of thousands for professional products. Most of the price is for the laptop he used to operate the system.

Doing this kind of interception “used to be a million dollars, now you can do it with a thousand times less cost,” Paget said during a press conference after his attack. “If it’s $1,500, it’s just beyond the range that people can start buying them for themselves and listening in on their neighbors.”

Paget’s device captures only 2G GSM calls, making AT&T and T-Mobile calls, which use GSM, vulnerable to interception. Paget’s aim was to highlight vulnerabilities in the GSM standard that allows a rogue station to capture calls. GSM is a second-generation technology that is not as secure as 3G technology.

Encrypted calls are not protected from interception because the rogue tower can simply turn it off. Although the GSM specifications say that a phone should pop up a warning when it connects to a station that does not have encryption, SIM cards disable that setting so that alerts are not displayed.

“Even though the GSM spec requires it, this is a deliberate choice on the cell phone makers,” Paget said.

The system captures only outbound calls. Inbound calls would go directly to voicemail during the period that someone’s phone is connected to Paget’s tower.

The device could be used by corporate spies, criminals, or private investigators to intercept private calls of targets.

“Any information that goes across a cell phone you can now intercept,” he said, except data. Professional grade IMSI catchers do capture data transfers, but Paget’s system doesn’t currently do this.

His setup included two RF directional antennas about three feet long to amplify his signal in the large conference room, a laptop and open source software. The system emitted only 25 milliwatts, “a hundred times less than your average cell phone,” he said.

Paget received a call from FCC officials on Friday who raised a list of possible regulations his demonstration might violate. To get around legal concerns, he broadcast on a GSM spectrum for HAM radios, 900Mhz, which is the same frequency used by GSM phones and towers in Europe, thus avoiding possible violations of U.S. regulations.

Just turning on the antennas caused two dozen phones in the room to connect to Paget’s tower. He then set it to spoof an AT&T tower to capture calls from customers of that carrier.

“As far as your cell phones are concerned, I am now indistinguishable from AT&T,” he said. “Every AT&T cell phone in the room will gradually start handing over to my network.”

During the demonstration, only about 30 phones were actually connecting to his tower. Paget says it can take time for phones to find the signal and hand off to the tower, but there are methods for speeding up that process.

To address privacy concerns, he set up the system to deliver a recorded message to anyone who tried to make a call from the room while connected to his tower. The message disclosed that their calls were being recorded. All of the data Paget recorded was saved to a USB stick, which he destroyed after the talk.

Customers of carriers that use GSM could try to protect their calls from being intercepted in this manner by switching their phones to 3G mode if it’s an option.

But Paget said he could also capture phones using 3G by sending out jamming noise to block 3G. Phones would then switch to 2G and hook up with his rogue tower. Paget had his jammer and an amplifier on stage but declined to turn them on saying they would “probably knock out all Las Vegas cell phone systems.”

Photo: Dave Bullock

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Cell phone eavesdropping enters script-kiddie phase

Black Hat Independent researchers have made good on a promise to release a comprehensive set of tools needed to eavesdrop on cell phone calls that use the world’s most widely deployed mobile technology.

“The whole topic of GSM hacking now enters the script-kiddie stage, similar to Wi-Fi hacking a couple years ago, where people started cracking the neighbor’s Wi-Fi,” said Karsten Nohl, a cryptographer with the Security Research Labs in Berlin who helped spearhead the project. “Just as with Wi-Fi, where they changed the encryption to WPA, hopefully that will happen with GSM, too.”

The suite of applications now includes Kraken, software being released at the Black Hat security conference on Thursday that can deduce the secret key encrypting SMS messages and voice conversations in as little as 30 seconds. It was developed by Frank A. Stevenson, the same Norwegian programmer who almost a decade ago developed software that cracked the CSS encryption schemeprotecting DVDs.

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GSM insecurity is largely the result of widely known weaknesses in A5/1, the algorithm used to decrypt calls in most of the developed world. Years ago, mobile operators devised A5/3, which requires some quintillion more mathematical operations to be cracked. It has yet to be adopted as mobile operators fret that the change will be expensive and won’t work on older handsets. Many countries continue to use A5/0, which uses no meaningful encryption at all.

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Privacy concerns at Defcon

From Chris Paget’s Blog:

I’m planning to give a pretty spectacular demonstration of cellphone insecurity at Defcon, where I will intercept the cellular phone calls of the audience without any action required on their part. As you can imagine, intercepting cellphone calls is a Very Big Deal so I wanted to announce at least some of the plan to reassure everyone of their privacy.

First and foremost – I’m not just making this stuff up. I know when to get advice from a good lawyer, and in this case I’m taking the advice of the very best there is: the EFF. They’ve been kind enough to offer their help and I’m taking it – this is what we’ve worked out.

1. If you’re in an area where your cellphone calls might be intercepted, there will be prominent warning signs about the demo including the time and date as well as a URL for more info. This will be the only time when unknown handsets will be allowed to connect; at all other times only pre-registered handsets will be granted access. You will be clearly warned that by using your cellphone during the demo you are consenting to the interception, and that you should turn your cellphone off during that time if you do not consent. A recorded message with essentially the same info will also be played whenever a call is made from the demo network.

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On iPhone, beware of that AT&T Wi-Fi hot spot

cnet – A security researcher has discovered that any wireless network can pretend to be an AT&T Wi-Fi hot spot and thus lure unsuspecting iPhone users to an untrusted network connection.

Samy Kamkar, who created a worm that garnered him a million friends on MySpace overnight in 2005, said in an interview this week that he can hijack any iPhone within Wi-Fi range in what is often dubbed a “man-in-the-middle” attack because of the way the devices are configured to recognize AT&T Wi-Fi connections merely by the name “attwifi.”

Typically, an iPhone will look for a specific MAC address–the unique identifier for the router–to verify that the wireless network is a device a user agreed to join previously. However, if the iPhone has previously connected to any one of the numerous free AT&T Wi-Fi hot spots (offered at virtually every Starbucks in the U.S., for example) the device will ignore what the MAC address says and simply connect to the network if it has “AT&T Wifi” attached, Kamkar said.

“The iPhone joins the network by name with no other form of authentication,” he said.

Kamkar said he made this discovery recently when he was at a Starbucks and disconnected from the AT&T Wi-Fi network.

“I went into the settings to disconnect and the prompt was different from normal,” he said. “I went home and had my computer pretend to be an AT&T hot spot just by the name and my iPhone continued to connect to it. I saw one or two other iPhones hop onto the network, too, going through my laptop computer. I could redirect them, steal credentials as they go to Web sites,” among other stealth moves, if he had wanted to.

To prove that a hijack is possible, Kamkar wrote a program that displays messages and can make other modifications when someone is attempting to use the Google Maps program on an iPhone that has been intercepted. He will be releasing his hijacking program via his Twitter account: http://twitter.com/samykamkar.

Kamkar hasn’t attempted the hijack on an iPod Touch, but plans to determine whether it has the same vulnerability.

iPhone users can protect themselves by disabling their Wi-Fi, or they can turn off the automatic joining of the AT&T Wi-Fi network, but only if the device is within range of an existing AT&T hot spot, Kamkar said.

Asked for comment an Apple spokeswoman said: “iPhone performs properly as a Wi-Fi device to automatically join known networks. Customers can also choose to select to ‘Forget This Network’ after using a hot spot so the iPhone doesn’t join another network of the same name automatically.”

Kamkar, an independent researcher based in Los Angeles, first made a name for himself by launching what was called the “Samy” worm on MySpace in order to see how quickly he could get friends on the social-networking site. The cross-site scripting (XSS) worm displayed the words “Samy is my hero” on a victim’s profile and when others viewed the page they were infected.

He served three years of probation under a plea agreement reached in early 2007 for releasing the worm.

Source: cnet

Hacker Unleashes BlackBerry Spyware

Proof-of-concept demonstrates ease at which mobile spyware can be created to pilfer text messages and email, eavesdrop, and track victim’s physical location via smartphone’s GPS.

Tyler Shields, senior researcher for Veracode’s Research Lab, also released proof-of-concept source code for a spyware app he created and demonstrated at the hacker confab in Washington, D.C., that forces the victim’s BlackBerry to hand over its contacts and messages. The app also can grab text messages, listen in on the victim, as well as track his physical location via the phone’s GPS. The spyware sits on the victim’s smartphone, and an attacker can remotely use the app to dump the user’s contact list, email inbox, and SMS message. It even keeps the attacker updated on new contacts the victim adds to his contact list. “This is a proof-of-concept to demonstrate how mobile spyware and applications for malicious behavior are trivial to write just by using the APIs of the mobile OS itself,” Shields says.{hwdvideoshare}id=23|width=|height={/hwdvideoshare}Smartphones are expected to become the next big target as they get more functionality and applications, yet remain notoriously unprotected, with only 23 percent of its users deploying security on these devices. And smartphone vendors for the most part have been lax in how they vet applications written for their products, security experts say.

“Personal information is traveling from the PC to the smartphone. The same data they are attacking on the PC is now on a lower-security form factor where security is less mature,” Shields says. “It makes sense that [attackers] will follow the money to that new device.”

His spyware app, TXSBBSpy, could be plugged into an innocuous-looking video game or other application that a user would download. Then the bad guys could harvest contacts they could sell for spamming purposes, for instance, he says. Although Shields’ spyware app is only a blueprint for writing a spyware app, writing one of these apps is simple, he says.

“If we try to tell ourselves that the bad guys don’t already know how to do this, we’re lying. This is trivial to create,” he says. Shields has posted a video demo of his BlackBerry spyware tool.

Indeed, smartphone apps were a hot topic last week: A researcher at Black Hat DC demonstrated his own spyware app for iPhones, SpyPhone, which can harvest email addresses as well as information from the user’s Safari searches and his or her keyboard cache. Nicolas Seriot, a software engineer and scientific collaborator at the Swiss University of Applied Sciences, says Apple iPhone’s review process for apps doesn’t stop these types of malicious apps from being downloaded to iPhone users.

Veracode’s Shields says app stores such as BlackBerry’s, where users download free or fee-based applications for their phones, can be misleading to users. “The app store makes the problem worse by giving customers a sense of security, so they don’t necessarily screen for this ‘trust’ button,” Shields says.

The problem is that mobile spyware is “trivial” to create, and the security model of most mobile platforms is inadequate because no one uses the security features and sandboxing methods that protect user data, he says.

Shields recommends that enterprises using BlackBerry Enterprise Server set policies that restrict users from downloading third-party applications or whitelist the ones that are vetted and acceptable.

Users can also configure their default app permissions so that when an app tries to access a user’s email or contact list, the OS prompts the user for permission. Shields says to avoid setting an app to “trusted application status.”

As for app store owners like BlackBerry AppWorld, Apple iTunes, and Google Android Marketplace, Shields recommends the vendors check the security of all applications in these stores. That way, apps would undergo a rigorous vetting process before they hit the stores. “Some are [doing this], but I’m not sure to what degree,” he says. “Regardless of what they are catching or not, they are not telling us what they are looking for.”

Shields’ TXSBBSpy spyware, meanwhile, isn’t the first such tool for the BlackBerry. There’s the controversial tool FlexiSPY, aimed at tracking employees, children, or cheating spouses, but considered by anti-malware companies as malicious code. And there has been at least one documented case of a major spyware infiltration on the BlackBerry: Users in the United Erab Emirates last year were sent a spyware-laden update to their BlackBerrys on the Etisalat network.

Written by :

Andrew Afifi

Municipal officials detained for wiretapping

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Officials from Ankara’s Yenimahalle Municipality, governed by the Republican People’s Party (CHP), are suspected of being members of a wiretapping gang, which wiretaps phone conversations to use as blackmail. The Ankara Police Department’s public order unit detained 20 people on Saturday as part of the operation. Police also seized jammer devices, bugging devices and programs, hand grenades and two guns as well as fake police identity cards in the raids they carried out at the houses and workplaces of the suspects. The guns were sent to the criminal laboratory of the Ankara Police Department.

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Wiretapping scandals prompt suspicions about gov’t pressure in Turkey

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Wiretaps target judiciary

As wiretapping scandals have become almost routine in Turkey, the public perception of these incidents has created a growing climate of fear in substantial segments of the population, prompting thoughts that “everyone wiretaps each other, everyone plots against each other.”

Although most of the eavesdropping incidents are linked to the ongoing Ergenekon investigation, the frequency of leaks of private phone conservations, including secret tapings – generally to pro-government media sources – has created tension in Turkey’s already polarized political climate.

The victims of wiretapping and secret video taping include a broad range of prominent figures, from former CHP chief Deniz Baykal to Chief of General Staff Gen. İlker Başbuğ to Istanbul Chief Prosecutor Aykut Cengiz Engin, under whom the Ergenekon probe is being carried out.

The Supreme Court of Appeals and Council of State have recently claimed that their facilities had been tapped and demanded an examination of their switchboards, claims that came amid the conflict between the government and the judiciary over judicial independence and the controversial constitutional amendments.

For Emine Ülker Tarhan, the chairwoman of the Judges and Prosecutors Association, or YARSAV, such incidents are kinds of “dirty social engineering projects” carried out by dark powers trying to manipulate the public.

“Such illegal wiretaps against members of the judiciary aim to put pressure on the judiciary, which is deemed an obstacle to the government’s ambitions to change the regime,” Tarhan said. “These illegal wiretaps are constantly reported in certain pro-government media outlets with ruling government-affiliated statements.”

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Surveillance Self Defense (From EFF’s site)

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Easy interception. Cell phone communications are sent through the air like communications from a walkie-talkie, and encryption is usually inadequate or absent. Although there are substantial legal protections for the privacy of cell phone calls, it’s technologically straightforward to intercept cell phone calls on many cell networks without the cooperation of the carrier, and the technology to do this is only getting cheaper. Such interception without legal process could be a serious violation of privacy laws, but would be immensely difficult to detect. U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies have the technical capacity to intercept unencrypted and weakly encrypted cell phone calls on a routine basis.

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Italy: Wiretapping Bill Advances

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s conservative government won a vote in the Senate on Thursday on a bill that restricts wiretaps and fines media organizations that report information derived from wiretaps used in criminal investigations before the case goes to trial. The bill, which now goes to the lower house for final approval, would require a three-judge panel, instead of a single judge, to approve a wiretap; limit the number of days for a wiretap; and require special authorization to listen in on priests.

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