Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire About your cell phone calls being private...

The flaws, to be reported at a hacker conference in Hamburg this month, are the latest evidence of widespread insecurity on SS7, the global network that allows the world�s cellular carriers to route calls, texts and other services to each other. Experts say it�s increasingly clear that SS7, first designed in the 1980s, is riddled with serious vulnerabilities that undermine the privacy of the world�s billions of cellular customers.

The flaws discovered by the German researchers are actually functions built into SS7 for other purposes � such as keeping calls connected as users speed down highways, switching from cell tower to cell tower � that hackers can repurpose for surveillance because of the lax security on the network.

Those skilled at the myriad functions built into SS7 can locate callers anywhere in the world, listen to calls as they happen or record hundreds of encrypted calls and texts at a time for later decryption. There also is potential to defraud users and cellular carriers by using SS7 functions, the researchers say.

These vulnerabilities continue to exist even as cellular carriers invest billions of dollars to upgrade to advanced 3G technology aimed, in part, at securing communications against unauthorized eavesdropping. But even as individual carriers harden their systems, they still must communicate with each other over SS7, leaving them open to any of thousands of companies worldwide with access to the network. That means that a single carrier in Congo or Kazakhstan, for example, could be used to hack into cellular networks in the United States, Europe or anywhere else.

Disclaimer: I am not a phone geek, so the article might be way off point.

Anyone that has ever thought that their cell phone was "private" must not understand the concept of radio waves, and how cell phones work.

Yep. That sumbish ain't nothing but a full-duplex radio.

Yeah, but this article changes the scope of eavesdropping from a few miles or whatever to worldwide. Realistically, eavesdropping on, say, 535 named individuals' cell phones via radio interception would be a massive undertaking. But with these vulnerabilities, apparently it becomes a piece of cake.

There is no more private, not anywhere. I am shocked that some folks think there still is.

Really? I was listening to cell phone calls in the 90's on a Motorola Radio monitor.

Don't change nothing, there is a reason you don't carry a cell phone into a SCIF. Cell phones are microphones, plain and simple.


I would NEVER consider saying ANYTHING I didn't want the world to know if there was a cell phone in the room.