Collaborate Disseminate
After 175 million failed password guesses, a judge rules that the Canadian police must return a suspect’s phone.
[Judge] Carter said the investigation can continue without the phones, and he noted that Ottawa police have made a formal request to … Continue reading Canadian Citizen Gets Phone Back from Police
A FEMA test of the Emergency Alert System is scheduled for October 4th, prompting conspiracy theories. Continue reading Every Phone and TV In the US Is Going to Scream Tomorrow. Here’s What You Need to Know.
Interesting forensics in connection with a serial killer arrest:
Investigators went through phone records collected from both midtown Manhattan and the Massapequa Park area of Long Island—two areas connected to a “burner phone” they had tied to the killings. (In court, prosecutors later said the burner phone was identified via an email account used to “solicit and arrange for sexual activity.” The victims had all been Craigslist escorts, according to officials.)
They then narrowed records collected by cell towers to thousands, then to hundreds, and finally down to a handful of people who could match a suspect in the killings…
Continue reading Tracking Down a Suspect through Cell Phone Records
The French police are getting new surveillance powers:
French police should be able to spy on suspects by remotely activating the camera, microphone and GPS of their phones and other devices, lawmakers agreed late on Wednesday, July 5.
[…]
Covering laptops, cars and other connected objects as well as phones, the measure would allow the geolocation of suspects in crimes punishable by at least five years’ jail. Devices could also be remotely activated to record sound and images of people suspected of terror offenses, as well as delinquency and organized crime…
Continue reading French Police Will Be Able to Spy on People through Their Cell Phones
The FBI is warning people against using public phone-charging stations, worrying that the combination power-data port can be used to inject malware onto the devices:
Avoid using free charging stations in airports, hotels, or shopping centers. Bad actors have figured out ways to use public USB ports to introduce malware and monitoring software onto devices that access these ports. Carry your own charger and USB cord and use an electrical outlet instead.
How much of a risk is this, really? I am unconvinced, although I do carry a USB condom for charging stations I find suspicious…
Continue reading FBI Advising People to Avoid Public Charging Stations
The two people who shut down four Washington power stations in December were arrested. This is the interesting part:
Investigators identified Greenwood and Crahan almost immediately after the attacks took place by using cell phone data that allegedly showed both men in the vicinity of all four substations, according to court documents.
Nowadays, it seems like an obvious thing to do—although the search is probably unconstitutional. But way back in 2012, the Canadian CSEC—that’s their NSA—did some top-secret work on this kind of thing. The document is part of the Snowden archive, and I …
Continue reading Identifying People Using Cell Phone Location Data
They’re using commercial phones, which go through the Ukrainian telecom network:
“You still have a lot of soldiers bringing cellphones to the frontline who want to talk to their families and they are either being intercepted as they go through a Ukrainian telecommunications provider or intercepted over the air,” said Alperovitch. “That doesn’t pose too much difficulty for the Ukrainian security services.”
[…]
“Security has always been a mess, both in the army and among defence officials,” the source said. “For example, in 2013 they tried to get all the staff at the ministry of defence to replace our iPhones with Russian-made Yoto smartphones…
Continue reading Ukraine Intercepting Russian Soldiers’ Cell Phone Calls
Everyone visiting Qatar for the World Cup needs to install spyware on their phone.
Everyone travelling to Qatar during the football World Cup will be asked to download two apps called Ehteraz and Hayya.
Briefly, Ehteraz is an covid-19 tracking app, while Hayya is an official World Cup app used to keep track of match tickets and to access the free Metro in Qatar.
In particular, the covid-19 app Ehteraz asks for access to several rights on your mobile., like access to read, delete or change all content on the phone, as well as access to connect to WiFi and Bluetooth, override other apps and prevent the phone from switching off to sleep mode…
The Washington Post is reporting that the US Customs and Border Protection agency is seizing and copying cell phone, tablet, and computer data from “as many as” 10,000 phones per year, including an unspecified number of American citizens. This is done without a warrant, because “…courts have long granted an exception to border authorities, allowing them to search people’s devices without a warrant or suspicion of a crime.”
CBP’s inspection of people’s phones, laptops, tablets and other electronic devices as they enter the country has long been a controversial practice that the agency has defended as a low-impact way to pursue possible security threats and determine an individual’s “intentions upon entry” into the U.S. But the revelation that thousands of agents have access to a searchable database without public oversight is a new development in what privacy advocates and some lawmakers warn could be an infringement of Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures…
Continue reading Large-Scale Collection of Cell Phone Data at US Borders
Twilio was hacked earlier this month, and the phone numbers of 1,900 Signal users were exposed:
Here’s what our users need to know:
- All users can rest assured that their message history, contact lists, profile information, whom they’d blocked, and other personal data remain private and secure and were not affected.
- For about 1,900 users, an attacker could have attempted to re-register their number to another device or learned that their number was registered to Signal. This attack has since been shut down by Twilio. 1,900 users is a very small percentage of Signal’s total users, meaning that most were not affected…
Continue reading Signal Phone Numbers Exposed in Twilio Hack