Tapping into Mobile Phones?

Craig1981

Craig1981

Craig1981

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I'm almost 100% sure its impossible, but is there anyway outside of tv shows to remotely hack into someones mobile phone and listen to their phone calls.

I only ask because I work for a mobile phone companies customer service department and I had a guy on the other night insisting this was happening to him. Wont go into too much detail for obvious reasons, but he was staying at this caravan park and apparantly one of the other residents has loads of different ariels outside his van and spends most of the time indoors. And a few other residents are convinced he must be upto something (sharpen your pitchforks eh?) Also he claimed a couple of times he got a bit of static on the line, so that of course proves hes being hacked! :rolleyes:

Pure delusion or is there any way at all the guy is right?
 
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Years ago it was possible but now that everything is digital+encrypted it's not unless there's some sort of trojan app on the phone that's conferencing someone else in to the calls. The only place it can be done is provider side I believe.
 
This guy at the trailer park is most likely an amateur radio operator. I don't see how a civilian could attempt to tap a mobile phone. It used to be possible when phones weren't digital and indeed when phones first went digital as they weren't encrypted but nowadays they are all digital and encrypted so unless he is able to decrypt the signal (which is practically impossible without knowing the keys) your customer is just a moron.
 
Don't believe so, I would tell him that it would be best to speak to police and not a company that has nothing to do with it. As others said, he could just be into amateur radio lol.
 
If the guy is doing some high powered radio tranmission (especially if its illegal and not within civilian spec) it could potentially interfer with mobile phones nearby - tho it wouldn't be intercepting their calls.

Technically it would be possible to capture and decrypt mobile phone calls but it would take some significant hardware to make it feasible - not that kinda stuff you'd have sitting in a caravan. As for hacking into a phone directly - theres such a range of OS, hardware, configurations, etc. that its not really feasible - the odd short range bluetooth exploit aside thats only really possible with very old phones now.
 
Rroff said:
If the guy is doing some high powered radio tranmission (especially if its illegal and not within civilian spec) it could potentially interfer with mobile phones nearby - tho it wouldn't be intercepting their calls.

Technically it would be possible to capture and decrypt mobile phone calls but it would take some significant hardware to make it feasible - not that kinda stuff you'd have sitting in a caravan.
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Depends on the bit length, good luck with 128bit and even more good luck with 256 bit.
 
RomanNose said:
Depends on the bit length, good luck with 128bit and even more good luck with 256 bit.
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Anything under 512bit RSA these days is theoretically breakable with the right hardware in days - not sure what the reality is as its not something I've kept up with but I remember a demonstration of a proof of concept attack under controlled circumstances on a 1024bit RSA key that could work on a pair of 9800GX2 in just 4 days (IIRC was something like 14 thousand or 14 million years to do via brute force) and this was a few years back.
 
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SeraphX said:
Wouldn't asking your tech support department be easier? surely they should know?
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Heh.. :D

If you worked here you wouldnt asked me that. They are beyond useless. Use ANY excuse they can to avoid getting involved in a customers technical problems. I'd sooner ask a brick wall for its opinion than ask them.
 
Back when I worked for Vodafone I had a woman come in every two weeks claiming that her phone was being tapped by a ninja ***** multi billionaire businessman spy who was trying to con her out of her house. She was quite clearly bat**** but I was unfortunately not in a position to tell her where to go.
 
Rroff said:
Anything under 512bit RSA these days is theoretically breakable with the right hardware in days - not sure what the reality is as its not something I've kept up with but I remember a demonstration of a proof of concept attack under controlled circumstances on a 1024bit RSA key that could work on a pair of 9800GX2 in just 4 days (IIRC was something like 14 thousand or 14 million years to do via brute force) and this was a few years back.
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Wikipedia says this
149,745,258,842,898 years
at 2^56 permutations per second
What kind of hardware are you talking about? Maybe RSA is weaker than other protocols. I better ask my comp sci friend.
Also why is it the case that there have been no cases of 256 bit being cracked by police etc? If they had the power to do it, why aren't they using it?
 
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RomanNose said:
Wikipedia says this
149,745,258,842,898 years
at 2^56 permutations per second
What kind of hardware are you talking about? Maybe RSA is weaker than other protocols. I better ask my comp sci friend.
Also why is it the case that there have been no cases of 256 bit being cracked by police etc? If they had the power to do it, why aren't they using it?
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When I used to do video game development I ended up spending a lot of time in an IRC channel that had people like Luigi Auriemma in it as they'd often find exploits in engines I'd be working on (built a few products on top of idtech3) before anyone else. One day a guy posted proof of concept for a feasible attack on 1024bit RSA that worked on a pair of 9800GX2s in just days - I never followed it up or saw any more on it but there were guys a lot more qualified on the matter than I am who agreed it was a feasible proof of concept - and tbh they have no reason to go public with that kinda power if they do sucessfully break it.
 
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Rroff said:
When I used to do video game development I ended up spending a lot of time in an IRC channel that had people like Luigi Auriemma in it as they'd ofen find exploits in engines I'd be working on (built a few products on top of idtech3) before anyone else. One day a guy posted proof of concept for a feasible attack on 1024bit RSA that worked on a pair of 9800GX2s in just days - I never followed it up or saw any more on it but there were guys a lot more qualified on the matter than I am who agreed it was a feasible proof of concept - and tbh they have no reason to go public with that kinda power if they do sucessfully break it.
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I would say it's nonsense, those graphics cards don't have the power to do it. It's not a question of software, it's the fact that there is not a single piece of hardware has the power to do it in that timeframe.
Lots of things on the internet are made up.
 
When I worked in Sky, we had multiple letters from a guy claiming similar from Sky dishes and he wanted all of them in the UK taken down. It also from time to time include diagrams on how it worked.

Guy was a loonly, so is this guy.
 
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