Can Anyone Listen Oon Your GSM Phone Calls?
January 19, 2010
I came across this article entitled “Anyone can listen in on your GSM phone calls”. *GASP!* … (well actually I was not that surprised and I’ll explain later why). In that article it says:
“security experts presented research at a
For the uninitiated, 1 terabyte is equal to 1 trillion bytes. Wow that’s way too much more data than my current PC can handle (I really think I need to buy a new one). Anyways, data that large needs a super computer to decrypt it … Not anymore! With the super fast computers these days cracking codes takes much less time! But why is GSM vulnerable against such? Wasn’t it supposed to be the state-of-the-art in telecommunication when it came out? True! It was the state-of-the-art when it came out. But that’s the problem, it WAS!!! Read the full article here for more details.
I mentioned earlier that I was not that surprised when I came across this. Well I used to have a friend who worked for a telco. Part of his job is monitor the signal of the cell sites (at least that’s what I think was part of his job) and in order to do that they have this gadget that looks like hand held radio that scans the frequency and it was probably programmed to decrypt the data and convert it to audio. Using that gadget, we were able to hear one side of the telephone conversation. One side only because the other side uses a different frequency (I think). And this happened more than ten years ago! And computer speed at that time runs on Kilohertz not Gigahertz! So, it is most probable that the technology to crack such data have improved so much then.
Should I be alarmed? Why should I? Why would someone spend as much as $30K to listen to my phone conversation?
Source: Yahoo! Tech
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