{"id":47145,"date":"2014-09-08T12:00:12","date_gmt":"2014-09-08T11:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=47145"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:30:38","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:30:38","slug":"mysterious-fake-cellphone-towers-are-intercepting-calls-all-over-the-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/09\/mysterious-fake-cellphone-towers-are-intercepting-calls-all-over-the-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Mysterious Fake Cellphone Towers Are Intercepting Calls All Over the US"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every smart phone has a secondary OS, which can be hijacked by high-tech hackers.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Fake_Cellphone_Towers_usa<\/a><\/p>\n

3 Sep 2014 – <\/em>Seventeen fake cellphone towers were discovered across the U.S. last week, according to a report in Popular Science.<\/a> [Click and see original message]<\/p>\n

Rather than offering you cellphone service, the towers appear to be connecting to nearby phones, bypassing their encryption, and either tapping calls or reading texts.<\/p>\n

Les Goldsmith, the CEO of ESD America, used ESD’s CryptoPhone 500 to detect 17 bogus cellphone towers. ESD<\/a> is a leading American defense and law enforcement technology provider based in Las Vegas.<\/p>\n

\"Unencrypted<\/a>

Unencrypted Connection
Les Goldsmith<\/p><\/div>\n

With most phones, these fake communication towers are undetectable. But not for the CryptoPhone 500,\u00a0 a customized Android device that is disguised as a Samsung Galaxy S III<\/a>\u00a0but has highly advanced encryption.<\/p>\n

Goldsmith told Popular Science: <\/a>” Interceptor use in the U.S. is much higher than people had anticipated. One of our customers took a road trip from Florida to North Carolina and he found eight different interceptors on that trip. We even found one at South Point Casino in Las Vegas.\u201d<\/p>\n

The towers were found in July, but the report implied that there may have been more out there.<\/p>\n

Although it is unclear who owns the towers, ESD found that several of them were located near U.S. military bases.<\/p>\n

“Whose interceptor is it? Who are they, that’s listening to calls around military bases? Is it just the U.S. military, or are they foreign governments doing it? The point is: we don’t really know whose they are,” Goldsmith said to Popular Science.<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s probably not the NSA \u2014 that agency can tap all it wants without the need for bogus towers<\/a>, VentureBeat reported:<\/p>\n

Not the NSA, cloud security firm SilverSky CTO\/SVP Andrew Jaquith told us. \u201cThe NSA doesn\u2019t need a fake tower,\u201d he said. \u201cThey can just go to the carrier\u201d to tap your line.<\/p>\n

ComputerWorld points out that the fake towers give themselves away by crushing down the performance of your phone from 4G to 2G while the intercept is taking place<\/a>. So if you see your phone operating on a slow download signal while you’re near a military base … maybe make that call from somewhere else.<\/p>\n

In an amazing coincidence, police departments in a handful of U.S. cities have been operating “Stingray” or “Hailstorm” towers<\/a>, which \u2014 you guessed it \u2014 conduct surveillance on mobile phone activity. They do that by jamming mobile phone signals, forcing phones to drop down from 4G and 3G network bands to the older, more insecure 2G band.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 yahoo.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\ufeff3 Sep 2014 – Every smart phone has a secondary OS, which can be hijacked by high-tech hackers. Seventeen fake cellphone towers were discovered across the U.S. last week, according to a report in Popular Science.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whistleblowing-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47145\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}