32 Years of the Digest ... founded August 21, 1981

Add this Digest to your personal   or  

The Telecom Digest for June 9, 2014
Volume 33 : Issue 101 : "text" Format
Messages in this Issue:
All the ways your phone can be hacked; article and video (Thad Floryan)

====== 32 years of TELECOM Digest -- Founded August 21, 1981 ======

Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. All contents here are copyrighted by Bill Horne and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using any name or email address included herein for any reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to that person, or email address owner.
Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without the explicit written consent of the owner of that address. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk are definitely unwelcome.

We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands against crime.  - Geoffrey Welsh


See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer, and other stuff of interest.


Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2014 22:10:24 -0700 From: Thad Floryan <thad@thadlabs.com> To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: All the ways your phone can be hacked; article and video Message-ID: <5393F040.6020503@thadlabs.com> This article: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/tapped-all-the-ways-your-phone-can-be-hackedis episode 3 of a 3-episode series; episodes 1 and 2 are linked at the end of this posting of episode 3's extract for the curious. Following is an extract from the beginning of the above article: The headline was published on a trusted news site that I read off of my iPhone. It stunned me into disbelief: "A 9.5 Magnitude Earthquake Destroys Central California, Splits State Into Northern and Southern Halves," it read. Fortunately for the inhabitants of the Golden State, this was not real news. Rather, it was some crafty misinformation that was wirelessly injected into my phone by a hacker named Samy Kamkar. In our third and final episode of "Phreaked Out" we tackle the question of mobile phone security. With global smartphone ownership expected to hit nearly 1.75 billion by the end of 2014, the threat of phone attacks is becoming as democratized as ever. Anyone with a smartphone is exploitable; any smartphone can be compromised. The control we thought we had over our devices has increasingly eroded away. The sophistication levels of our mobile devices allow them to moonlight as spy tools capable of the absolute worst case scenario: turning on their owners. It's a sobering reality that fascinates Kamkar. I met up with the security polymath -- the same Samy Kamkar responsible for the virus that knocked out MySpace in 2005 -- at his Tony Spark-esque enclave in West Hollywood for a series of phone hack demos. To begin, Kamkar recreated a man-in-the-middle mobile attack, whereby he created an unencrypted, wireless network that combines ARP and DNS spoofing intended to modify content on any phone that joins it. The demonstration illustrated how eager our smartphones can be to automatically hop onto any previously accessed network. For example, by forging a commonly dubbed wifi name, such as "attwifi" or "Starbucks," Kamkar can dupe phones into thinking it's joining a secure network. He admits that this man-in-the-middle style attack is by no means cutting edge, but it still works because many phones are still susceptible. Ever stop to think that phones can graduate from hacking target to hacking assailant? On the heels of Kamkar's headline-swapping trick, he showed us how phones and tablets can be instrumental in controlling drones that then hack each other in the sky. Our cameras were rolling for Kamkar's first ever, live demonstration of his zombie drone hack. He calls it Skyjack. Here's how it worked: Kamkar spun up a "master" drone to detect any wireless signals from other exploitable drones (currently limited to the Parrot AR.Drone for now). Once a signal is identified, the master drone injects packets to the Parrot's unprotected network, enabling it to de-authenticate the target drone from its owner. In this case, Kamkar programmed the zombified drone to perform a flip once its controls were hijacked by the master drone. Kamkar was inspired by Amazon's far-fetched but not implausible drone delivery service. Here, the phone or tablet-controlled Skyjack can exploit weaknesses in the open networks of some of today's drones. So think twice before ordering a pricey Leica M9 digital camera using Amazon's Prime Air drone service because a more spiteful hacker than Kamkar might just be able to reroute it to their doorstep. (To be fair, Amazon will likely have thought of this scenario by the time it brings drone delivery to market.) { article continues at the URL cited at the beginning of this posting } The video supporting this phone hacks article is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dysnKiXUlRU runtime 19:06 For the curious who would like to see the first two episodes of the 3-part "Phreaked Out" series: Unlocking L.A.'s Traffic Grid: Phreaked Out (Episode 1) http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-las-traffic-system-got-hacked http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcoVMXLTQzw runtime 10:00 How to Hack a Car: Phreaked Out (Episode 2) http://motherboard.vice.com/read/we-drove-a-car-while-it-was-being-hacked http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jstaBeXgAs runtime 12:15 Thad
TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly to telecom- munications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to Usenet, where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Bill Horne. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copyrighted. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occasional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. The Telecom Digest is moderated by Bill Horne.
Contact information: Bill Horne
Telecom Digest
43 Deerfield Road
Sharon MA 02067-2301
339-364-8487
bill at horne dot net
Subscribe: telecom-request@telecom-digest.org?body=subscribe telecom
Unsubscribe: telecom-request@telecom-digest.org?body=unsubscribe telecom
This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal about telecomm-
unications on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and
published continuously since then.  Our archives are available for
your review/research. We believe we are the oldest e-zine/mailing list
on the internet in any category!

URL information: http://telecom-digest.org


Copyright (C) 2014 TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved.
Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA.

Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of fifty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization.

End of The Telecom Digest (1 message)

Return to Archives ** Older Issues