Well a small post goes in here decribing the triggerfish tecnlogy and why it has created a buzz this summer.

Triggerfish, also known as cell-site simulators or digital analyzers, are nothing new: the technology was used in the 1990s to hunt down renowned hacker Kevin Mitnick. By posing as a cell tower, triggerfish trick nearby cell phones into transmitting their serial numbers, phone numbers, and other data to law enforcement. Most previous descriptions of the technology, however, suggested that because of range limitations, triggerfish were only useful for zeroing in on a phone’s precise location once cooperative cell providers had given a general location.

This summer, however, the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the Justice Department, seeking documents related to the FBI’s cell-phone tracking practices. Since August, they’ve received a stream of documents—the most recent batch on November 6—that were posted on the Internet last week. In a post on the progressive blog Daily Kos, ACLU spokesperson Rachel Myers drew attention to language in several of those documents implying that triggerfish have broader application than previously believed.

Well there are also devices like IMSI catcher which forces the transmission of the International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) and intercepting GSM mobile phone calls.

The GSM specification requires the handset to authenticate to the network, but does NOT require the network to authenticate to the handset. This well-known security hole can be exploited by an IMSI-catcher.

The IMSI-catcher masquerades as a base station and logs the IMSI numbers of all the mobile stations in the area, as they attempt to attach to the IMSI-catcher. It allows forcing the mobile phone connected to it to use no call encryption (i.e., it is forced into A5/0 mode), making the call data easy to intercept and convert to audio.

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One Response to “FEDs can lojack mobiles without telco help”

1. ritesh says:

   December 2, 2008 at 9:50 am

   On man! This sounds very scary…

   Thanks for the info.