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Mysterious Fake Mobile Phone Towers Are Intercepting Calls All Over The U.S.
[Business Insider] Seventeen fake mobile phone towers were discovered across the U.S. last week, according to a report in Popular Science.Tip firya Clyde, they are not "fake," they simply do not route traffic, at least not to the party you're attempting to call. Rather than offering you mobile phone service, the towers appear to be connecting to nearby phones, bypassing their encryption, and either tapping calls or reading texts. Les Goldsmith, the CEO of ESD America, used ESDs CryptoPhone 500 to detect 17 bogus mobile phone towers. ESD is a leading American defence and law enforcement technology provider based in Las Vegas. ESD With most phones, these fake communication towers towers are undetectable. But not for the CryptoPhone 500. It is a customised Android device that is disguised as a Samsung Galaxy S III, but has highly-advanced encryption. Goldsmith told Popular Science: Interceptor use in the U.S. is much higher than people had anticipated. One of our customers took a road trip from Florida to North Carolina and he found eight different interceptors on that trip. We even found one at South Point Casino in Las Vegas. The towers were found in July, but the report implied that there may have been more out there. Although it is unclear who owns the towers, ESD found that several of them were located near U.S. military bases. Proximity to U.S. military installations enables connectivity to secure systems. Next question please. Whose interceptor is it? Who are they, thats listening to calls around military bases? Is it just the U.S. military, or are they foreign governments doing it? The point is: we dont really know whose they are, Goldsmith said to Popular Science. Its probably not the NSA that agency can tap all it wants without the need for bogus towers, VentureBeat reported: Not the NSA, cloud security firm SilverSky CTO/SVP Andrew Jaquith told us. The NSA doesnt need a fake tower, he said. They can just go to the carrier to tap your line. Bypassing the "carrier" saves a lot of paperwork. Time is money. ComputerWorld points out that the fake towers give themselves away by crushing down the performance of your phone from 4G to 2G while the intercept is taking place. So if you see your phone operating on a slow download signal while youre near a military base maybe make that call from somewhere else. In an amazing coincidence, police departments in a handful of U.S. cities have been operating Stingray or Hailstorm towers which you guessed it conduct surveillance on mobile phone activity. They do that by jamming mobile phone signals, forcing phones to drop down from 4G and 3G network bands to the older, more insecure 2G band. Jamming, yes quite an amazing coincidence. Posted by: Besoeker 2014-09-04 |
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