good luck hacking my phone. Its on vodaphone and cant get a signal most of the time :(
GCHQ's SMURF ARMY can hack smartphones, says Snowden. Again.
Whistleblower Edward Snowden has given an interview to BBC investigative programme Panorama in which he's added further detail on an array of tools named after the Smurfs* that allow UK intelligence agencies to hack smartphones. Privacy International has already aired much of what Snowden explained to Panorama, namely that a …
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Friday 23rd October 2015 14:39 GMT Ken 16
Re: Soft switch
Back in 2000 when company issue was a Nokia 5510, normal practice at meetings was for everyone to unclip their battery and put in on the table in front of them. Data security was incidental, it was a way of ensuring everyone was focused on the meeting. I miss that feature. All my personal phones have replaceable batteries still because sometimes I run out of power but it's not that easy to swap them.
I think anyone clued up on security knew for the last decade that service texts can insert code with these features on anything even smart enough to run java, we just didn't know the pet names of the modules.
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Tuesday 6th October 2015 07:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Soft switch
Any premium or security concious design should sport a set of hardware (DIP) switches under the cover to allow us to independently and verifiably control mic, cam(s), radio, wifi, ROM lock, GPS, etc... at our discretion... but that would rather defeat their purpose, wouldn't it. So carry on pissing about with data-harvesting biometrics and passing that of as a "security"* effort they will.
Need a Yoda icon -->
* conspicuously neglecting to mention "services"
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Tuesday 6th October 2015 07:23 GMT Dave 126
Made me think of Chris Morris' film Four Lions:
BARRY:
The Feds can track your phone even if the battery’s out.
Really. They can see you underground right...
WAJ:
Can they see you if you’re not there?
BARRY:
Where’s there?
WAJ:
I don’t know.
BARRY:
They can see you everywhere, Waj.
FESSAL:
Are they looking at us through cameras?
BARRY:
Space cameras, yes
FESSAL:
But me dad says I’m not supposed to be on camera - it’s haram
BARRY:
With the greatest of respect Fessal your dad eats newspaper
FESSAL:
Not any more. He eats moths.
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Tuesday 6th October 2015 07:58 GMT Shonko Kid
"...he says can turn a phone on or off"
I call bullshit, it's easily provable that when off a phone isn't transmitting.
It could well be recieving, ie it wasn't off but in a deep sleep, and there was a mechanism like wake-on-lan. Even then that would be problematic, as it would require all cell towers to broadcast the message, in the hope that the target device is within range (it's not broadcasting, so only the last connected tower is known).
The other 'smurfs' he describes are possible, of course, basic spy-ware. Though I find it unlikely that the capability is present in un hacked phones, this would require far too great a level of compliance (and secrecy) from all phone manufacturers.
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Tuesday 6th October 2015 08:30 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "...he says can turn a phone on or off"
I wonder if what he means is that a flag is set in advance when the phone is turned on that the NSA is interested in it.
At that point when the user turns it off - it either doesn't fully turn off or turns back on again after a fixed period of time.
I'd like to see more evidence of this though.
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Tuesday 6th October 2015 09:24 GMT Velv
Re: "...he says can turn a phone on or off"
" Though I find it unlikely that the capability is present in un hacked phones, this would require far too great a level of compliance (and secrecy) from all phone manufacturers."
If your phone is open source then it's highly likely the spooks with almost unlimited access to good programmers are aware of the holes and vulnerabilities which have not been made public. Easy to then exploit without the assistance of the manufacturer.
Don't believe me? OpenSSL had a massive hole for four years until someone noticed it. Quite likely there are others to be exploited.
Closed source shouldn't get smug either. Don't for one minute think the spooks haven't stolen a copy of the source code, it's just that it isn't subject to possible peer review, so holes are less likely to be spotted.
Tinfoil hats on...
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Tuesday 6th October 2015 09:52 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "...he says can turn a phone on or off"
"Stolen"?!??!?!!!one
What the hell would they have to "steal" in the the face of the relevant corporations' "extreme willingness" to acquiesce to the whim of the TLAs?
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Tuesday 6th October 2015 10:14 GMT Stuart 22
Re: "...he says can turn a phone on or off"
The issue may be - not turning it on - but spoofing the 'turn off' so it didn't. It just appears turned off. Of course those that complain of bad battery drain overnight know what I'm talking about. There's nothing that pleases a spook more than to join in as a silent threesome just to make sure you, or your friend, doesn't scream "Allahu Akbar" at the climatic moment. Or something like that.
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Thursday 8th October 2015 02:52 GMT Mark 65
Re: "...he says can turn a phone on or off"
The issue may be - not turning it on - but spoofing the 'turn off' so it didn't. It just appears turned off. Of course those that complain of bad battery drain overnight know what I'm talking about.
There was me just thinking it was Apple wanting me to update an old iphone.
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Tuesday 6th October 2015 11:40 GMT Jess
Re: "...he says can turn a phone on or off"
A timed turn on would be possible. A deep sleep mode that records everything would be possible. This mode could check for control texts every now and then. It could even be tied into the motion sensor. Or/and it could use bluetooth to establish proximity of other target devices. Perhaps ensuring that only one such device was active at any one time. I bet they can even use the FM transceivers included in many devices.
If any part of the target's mobile system is subject to the Patriot Act then American Spooks will have pretty flexible access to the device. Telco, SIM manufacture, Phone manufacturer, OS manufacturer, even installed software. And that is before they have to resort to exploiting design flaws.
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Tuesday 6th October 2015 12:36 GMT PatientOne
Re: "...he says can turn a phone on or off"
"I call bullshit, it's easily provable that when off a phone isn't transmitting."
Not transmitting: Listening.
there're security apps available that claim to be able to remotely activate/deactivate and track your phone so you can locate it and recover it, even if it had been switched off (but not if the battery had been pulled). If they can do this, then there is a mechanism built in to the phone and into the network to allow it. It is, therefor, entirely possible that the Spooks knew about it and have an app, possibly hidden in the OS, to allow them to do exactly as claimed.
This is supposition, of cause, and dependant on those security apps being correct - would have to try one out to see - but perhaps someone else has already done so and is willing to share their experiences?
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Tuesday 6th October 2015 08:11 GMT Your alien overlord - fear me
When I was playing with SMS/MMS a few years ago (at a telco/SMSC level), I was setting the flag to do invisible texts. Worked on all phones (back then it was built into the standards). I also did 'instant pop-up' SMSes which didn't need any interaction with users and didn't get saved in the history.
The only phones these didn't work on was Nokia running Symbian OS - conspiracy theorists can ponder on how they were brought by an American company then effect;y closed down.
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Tuesday 6th October 2015 08:53 GMT Dan 55
Flash SMSes are still used for sending banking codes and are still understood by Android (they pop up a dialog box).
Invisible SMSes go to the baseband which pass it onto the SIM, there's probably a ton of exploits for the baseband and there definitely is for the SIM. Symbian 8 phones didn't have a baseband because they did everything with the phone OS but I'm pretty sure binary texts still worked, who could forget Orange's relentless barrage of SIM updates?
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Tuesday 6th October 2015 10:05 GMT Hans Neeson-Bumpsadese
Seems a bit far-fetched
As others have said earlier I think this has the faint whiff of bulls**t about it. Thinking on it, I can see two ways this could be implemented...
(a) through an exploit which allows the spooks to install spyware code of their choosing onto any phone. It's the "any" word that stands out to me...I can see this sort of exploit working in some cases but something that works on *any* phone (or even any mainstream phone) with all the permutations of hardware, OS, vendor-specific OS tweaks, etc.....that sounds a bit far-fetched to me.
(b) something installed into phoned at source...this sounds equally unlikely. To have managed to get their spyware code into the manufacturing chain of every phone (or even every mainstream phone) without their actions being detected (difficult/unlikely) or through collusion of the manufacturers without anyone in the manufacturing chain blowing the whistle (also highly unlikely)...that also sounds a bit pie in the sky.
I wonder if we're at the stage now where it's option (c)....Snowden is getting carried away and is just making stuff up, or presenting blue-sky project / brainstorming stuff as actual concrete product.
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Tuesday 6th October 2015 10:57 GMT Frank Leonhardt
Re: Seems a bit far-fetched
Deja vu
http://blog.frankleonhardt.com/2015/edward-snowden-says-smartphones-can-be-taken-over-by-text-message/
He's playing the credulous BBC like a fiddle; except that when you see what he actually said rather than what the BBC implied he said in the pre-broadcast hype, it's not so clear who's having a laugh.
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Tuesday 6th October 2015 11:35 GMT Little Mouse
Re: Seems a bit far-fetched
the credulous BBC
Well, this is the same BBC that endlessly repeated the "fact" that the abbreviation P.O.S. stood for "parent over shoulder" recently, in a truly ballsed-up attempt to educate grown-ups and prove that they're down-with-the-kids...
Much merriment ensued in the Mouse household on that particular day.
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Wednesday 7th October 2015 08:33 GMT Bazzza
Re: Seems a bit far-fetched
Depending on the context, POS can either stand for "piece of s**t" or "parent over shoulder". Going back the best part of 10 years to when my four kids were all on MSN Messenger every evening after school, I would say that the latter definition predates the former in my experience. No ?
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Tuesday 6th October 2015 12:47 GMT Dan 55
Re: Seems a bit far-fetched
I've no doubt they can be taken over by text message, if you set a flag when sending the text message, it's routed by the baseband to the SIM. If you couple that with an exploit, you've got 'em. I'm sure they've got plenty enough people dedicated to screwing about with Qualcomm SoCs and SIMs from a variety of operators (never knowingly known for security anyway).
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Tuesday 6th October 2015 20:47 GMT Anonymous Coward
I can see hacking the SIM
But how does that extend to pwning the whole phone? Does the SIM run at a sort of ring 0 type privilege, allowing it to modify Android/iOS to its hearts content or something? If so, that's probably something that should be address in the OS, and make the SIM run in some sort of virtual environment where it thinks it has control but the OS really has control over it.
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Tuesday 6th October 2015 12:39 GMT JetSetJim
Re: Seems a bit far-fetched
Far fetched? No - it's easily possibly with a feature called Mobile Device Management. There are several open specifications for it, so while there may be some platform dependent binaries around, the mechanism for getting a phone to install something is probably the same, and it shouldn't be too hard to get the phone to report its hardware config as part of the command/request messaging. You can use the system to push apps to a device, so it's not a big leap that this ability can be hidden from the user, and the apps may well have escalated permissions to enable them to do some funky monitoring. As has been said, all the user will see is sucky battery life, but how much suck-age is going to be dependent on how active/optimised the app(s) is/are.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
