Collaborate Disseminate
In this entertaining story of French serial criminal Rédoine Faïd and his jailbreaking ways, there’s this bit about cell phone surveillance:
After Faïd’s helicopter breakout, 3,000 police officers took part in the manhunt. According to the … Continue reading Identifying People Through Lack of Cell Phone Use
A newspaper in Malaysia is reporting on a cell phone cloning scam. The scammer convinces the victim to lend them their cell phone, and the scammer quickly clones it. What’s clever about this scam is that the victim is an Uber driver and the scamm… Continue reading Phone Cloning Scam
Vice is reporting on a cell phone vulnerability caused by commercial SMS services. One of the things these services permit is text message forwarding. It turns out that with a little bit of anonymous money — in this case, $16 off an anonymous prepaid credit card — and a few lies, you can forward the text messages from any phone to any other phone.
For businesses, sending text messages to hundreds, thousands, or perhaps millions of customers can be a laborious task. Sakari streamlines that process by letting business customers import their own number. A …
We all know that our cell phones constantly give our location away to our mobile network operators; that’s how they work. A group of researchers has figured out a way to fix that. “Pretty Good Phone Privacy” (PGPP) protects both user identity and user … Continue reading Cell Phone Location Privacy
Gizmodo is reporting that schools in the US are buying equipment to unlock cell phones from companies like Cellebrite:
Gizmodo has reviewed similar accounting documents from eight school districts, seven of which are in Texas, showing that administrators paid as much $11,582 for the controversial surveillance technology. Known as mobile device forensic tools (MDFTs), this type of tech is able to siphon text messages, photos, and application data from student’s devices. Together, the districts encompass hundreds of schools, potentially exposing hundreds of thousands of students to invasive cell phone searches. …
Continue reading US Schools Are Buying Cell Phone Unlocking Systems
Gizmodo is reporting that Harris Corp. is no longer selling Stingray IMSI-catchers (and, presumably, its follow-on models Hailstorm and Crossbow) to local governments:
L3Harris Technologies, formerly known as the Harris Corporation, notified police ag… Continue reading IMSI-Catchers from Canada
Gizmodo is reporting that Harris Corp. is no longer selling Stingray IMSI-catchers (and, presumably, its follow-on models Hailstorm and Crossbow) to local governments:
L3Harris Technologies, formerly known as the Harris Corporation, notified police ag… Continue reading IMSI-Catchers from Canada
There is a new report on police decryption capabilities: specifically, mobile device forensic tools (MDFTs). Short summary: it’s not just the FBI that can do it.
This report documents the widespread adoption of MDFTs by law enforcement in the United S… Continue reading New Report on Police Decryption Capabilities
To accurately forecast the weather, you first need lots of data — not just to train your forecasting models but also to generate more precise and granular forecasts. Typically, this has been the domain of government agencies, thanks to their access to this data and the compute power to run the extremely complex models. Anybody […] Continue reading ClimaCell bets on IoT for better weather forecasts
They allegedly victimized 442 military men by sending nude photos and then calling, pretending to be irate fathers or police. Continue reading Prisoners allegedly posed as underage girls in $560K sextortion scam