The 27th Chaos Communication Congress (27C3) in Berlin has been shown a demonstration of intercepting and recording calls and text messages on a GSM mobile phone. Researchers Karsten Nohl and Sylvain Munaut sent a ‘ghost’ text message to a target phone that enabled a hacker to target the handset’s unique identification number. Four budget Motorola phones were used in the demonstration, along with a laptop and open source software.
The whole process was said to take around 20 seconds. Parts of the end-to end hack, including decrypting the GSM A5/1 encryption, have been demonstrated at previous CCC meetings.
[Sources: Guardian.co.uk; Wired.com; BBC.co.uk]