Lax Security Exposes Voice Mail to Hacking, Study Says

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/technology/26iht-hack26.html

By KEVIN J. O'BRIEN
The New York Times
December 25, 2011

BERLIN -- It may be tempting to view the illegal interception of 
telephone voice mails, a practice that has roiled Britain and the News 
Corp. media empire of Rupert Murdoch, as an arcane tool employed by 
scofflaw journalists with friends in Scotland Yard.

But according to a study to be presented Tuesday, cellphone users in 
Europe and the rest of the world may be just as vulnerable as the actor 
Hugh Grant and other celebrities to having their personal voice mail 
hacked -- or worse -- because of outdated mobile network security.

In a study of 31 mobile operators in Europe, Morocco and Thailand, 
Karsten Nohl, a Berlin hacker and mobile security expert, found that 
many operators provided poor or weak defenses to protect consumers from 
illicit surveillance and identity theft.

Mr. Nohl said he was able to hack into mobile conversations and text 
messages and could impersonate the account identities of cellphone users 
in 11 countries using an inexpensive, 7-year-old Motorola cellphone and 
free decryption software available on the Internet. He has tested each 
mobile operator more than 100 times, he said, and has ranked the quality 
of their defenses.

[...]


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