Hey, Don't Freak Out Or Anything But Your Cellphone Might Be Spying On You
Newsweek has an article that you should not read if you're especially paranoid. Why? Because it says that according to a security consultant — the percentage of US cellphones that have been tapped with spyware could be as high as 3%.
Newsweek says that spyware which can be quickly downloaded to cellphones allows another party to activate the phone's microphone even when no call is being made, and leaves no trace that someone was listening the whole time.
More than 200 companies sell spy-phone software online, at prices as low as $50 (a few programs cost more than $300). Vendors are loath to release sales figures. But some experts-private investigators and consultants in counter-wiretapping, computer-security software and telecommunications market research-claim that a surprising number of people carry a mobile that has been compromised, usually by a spouse, lover, parent or co-worker. Many employees, experts say, hope to discover a supervisor's dishonest dealings and tip off the top boss anonymously.
Conspicuously missing from the article was any mention of how to tell if your phone has been compromised. Guess you're on your own for that.
The Spy In Your Hand [Newsweek] (Thanks, Steve!)
(Photo:Spinadelic)
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Comments:
They'd have to write an app for each phone OS, and each phone configuration... It would seem difficult.
"Spyware thrives on iPhones..." Really? It seems like that would be a top story on CNN, the way the media falls over itself for an Apple story.
To Newsweek, I say: Prove it. What phones are ACTUALLY vulnerable?
I've got an Android phone...it's been spying on me from day one!
i agree with zig.
iphone compromised?
prove it!
and not some theory. a live, in the wild compromise.
@pecan 3.14159265: Yeah, no point in listening in on my conversations with my husband unless you want all the boring details of our recent adventures in homeownership or want to become nauseous listening to our nicknames for one another.
Well, I guess that makes Batman's cellphone-based echo-location visualizing system that much more plausible now (although still the macguffin of Dark Knight).
As if accidental auto-dials wasn't bad enough.
@pecan 3.14159265: I was thinking the same thing - anyone spying on us would gouge their ears and / or eyes out in boredom within the first day. I am no international mistress of intrigue, I am sorry to say. But if you want to hear alllll about how cute our dog is, or listen to Star Trek TOS on Netflix, feel free to tune in...It's a wacky life, but someone has to lead it.
Simple, get the cheapest basic phone that basically just makes phone calls.
My calls are boring. Who wants to know about my trips to Colombia and deals with drug cartels-- I mean, who wants to know about my pizza deliveries?
Pfft, Here I was blaming it all on drunk dialing!
When I saw this I immediately thought of the Bluetooth headset vulnerability. All sets have the same code and it's possible to eavesdrop on conversations when anyone has one turned on. Or you could even send noises to the headset wearer. All you would need to do is be within range with the right gear. No programs necessary.
As far as spyware,all smartphones are vulnerable. Even iPhones. All you would have to do is click on a malicious text message, email message, or navigate to an evil web page.
I do like Macs and Apple products but come on Apple fanboys, carry some skepticism about the security of any product.
lololololololololol... windows on a cellphone was always a bad idea.
What I see as a real potential problem is when some sort of legal dispute is going on. Divorce cases or cases where someone is suing an employer or an insurance company. Lawyers can be pretty adept at trying to twist the most mundane and innocent thing into some sort of proof of villany, immorality or bad behavior on the part of a plaintiff.
What? You were discussing a horror movie, you must be planning a murder and your deeply disturbed. Even if this kind of spying isn't admissible in civil court it can feed someone information that they can use to establish strategy or go on a fishing expedition for something they can use based on what they now know.
My phone hasn't been listening, it's been talking to me. Telling me how cool I am, how evil that guy over there is...how he's talking behind my back, laughing at me, ridiculing me, how he must die.
Yep, this cell phone is my best friend.
@zigziggityzoo: You don't have a Verizon phone then. Verizon, in order to make it's employee's even stupider and less helpful, has been wiping any installed OS, and replacing it with their own. This means their employees only have to learn 1 way of doing something rather than all the different ones. That's why the 911 bug, the one that can get you killed, is in ALL of their phones from about two years ago.
From what I get from Alex Jones, this has been in place for decades, and every phone hub has entire floors that record all phone calls, emails, and texts, and routes them through computers.
The only thing I can't figure out is how they manage to listen for so long and not drain the battery any faster than when I am on a call...
Maybe people are snooping on my phone calls because they know I tell stories about people I encounter on the metro. It's my hobby when I get on the metro. I see the most interesting people...and also people who do things they don't think people see..but I see.
@zigziggityzoo: and there are probably java versions of the bug....
one obvious thing though, if your battery life suddenly falls....
@quail: I don't read any messages that aren't from people I know, I only open e-mail from people I know or companies I've approved to e-mail me, and I only go to websites I trust.
Take the same precautions you take on your home computer, and you can prevent some of this.
I am all the more glad that I use a brick-stupid and very unpopular phone model.
Unfortunately, I also have to carry a Blackberry issued by my employer. I think perhaps it may start getting its battery removed when I am not on call.
Prank Caller! PRANK CALLER!!
Same with me. 90% of my calls are to my wife and usually involve "I'm on my way home from work, do we need anything at the grocery store?"
We have internet/texting turned off on our phones so it's not very likely that anyone is remotely controlling our phones.
@pecan 3.14159265: I'm close to that same feeling when people ask me how I deal with having webcams in my house. My life is so boring and uneventful that anyone who has to view my life as a "job" should be getting hazard pay and also counseling to deal with hopelessness. :)
Um... how is this not illegal? Anyone claiming to sell this software should be shut down.
@I Love New Jersey: That's what I've got. GoPhone, i.e. pay by the minute and it is a basic phone. I'm not subject to spyware and I pay <$200 for phone costs annually since I use Skype when I'm at home. I've been doing this for the last 3 years.
@Nathaniel Dean: I think it might be the application of the technology being illegal, not the technology itself.
It might be perfectly legal for me to buy this and put it on my own phone, so that I could use it for a legitimate reason. But for me to put it on your phone would be illegal.
I can buy a key logger, screen capture, mouse movement recording software, and it's perfectly legal. It's designed for software testing. But if I put it on the computer at the Days Inn business center and steal your company login info, that's different.
YES! Insane theories 1, Regular theories 1 billion.
This has been my theory for years.
@pecan 3.14159265: That's because the other dimension's Mr & Ms Pi are the jet-setting international spies, silly girl.
@AluminumFalcon_GitEmSteveDave: Well, that and breaking your phone's hardware so you can't sync photos, videos and ringtones without Verizon getting a cut.
@quail: Have you ever installed an app on an iPhone or an iPod Touch?
There's any number of procedures, incl passwords, that squash precisely this scenario.
Nice of you to share your uninformed opinion, though.
@Ronin-Democrat: Yeah that article is severely lacking in actual facts to back up those accusations. One big problem with their theory, is that most of the operating systems on these phones are single threaded and do not allow background processes which is where most spyware resides.
This is especially true on the iPhone, once you close an application via the home button it's done, no more processing. I suppose, theoretically someone could somehow inject malicious code into a core piece of the iPhone OS. But I'm doubting you'd be able to do that through the application layer,and since the only other way to install something is via iTunes it would virtually impossible to get on the phone without actually having physical access. Again facts needed.
So unless they mean applications you buy through iTunes that masquerade as something else and spy on you, which is hard to imagine given Apples extremely tight control on what gets onto iTunes and would stil require you to leave the application running at all times to spy. Either way, sounds like fear mongering to me.
@pecan 3.14159265: yeah, before we were married and I was still in Canada and he was in the US, we'd taunt the automated NSA/CIA/whatever program of listening in on suspicious foriegn calls. We'd say the rumoured trigger phrases like "armed revolution" and "assassinate the president" and "blow up the capitol building" and then follow with several minutes of cutesie-wootsie snuggle talk. Ahh, the blissful days of innocent fun before September 2001...
BTW my 3.5 year old daughter would be delighted to hear of someone calling themselves Mr and Ms Pi. She started reciting the first ten just after turning two and she does 34 digits now. We even celebrated her Pi birthday, when she was 3.14 years old. She was more giddy about that than her real birthday. And Pi day is as good as any other holiday for her.
Another good reason my phone is just a phone...no camera, no Internet, just a phone.
@Nathaniel Dean: Spying... illegal!? Balderdash! You can thank the government, who've been spying on your phone calls thanks to the unquestioned help of the telcos for some time now. But it is for your own good, see, it makes you safer!
@zigziggityzoo:
Most handsets have J2ME (Java 2 Mobile Edition) or BREW (essentially J2ME but with revenue generation enhancements for the carriers). Since this is standardized, one program could work on MANY, MANY handsets.
@LastVigilante:
Remember, "when the president does something, it's not illegal". Who said that... was it Obama, Bush, or Nixon? When it comes to spying, they've all stated the same thing, just in different words.
@pecan 3.14159265: The spy people ought to be able to recite every episode of Frisky Dingo and Venture Brothers by now if I've been tapped.
@Trai_Dep: Well, there is a way around their ringtone scam. At least on the ones I had, if you email the file to yourself in mp3, but manually change the extension of the file to .mid, you could save it from the message to use as a ringtone. The other workaround was to save it on your mem card, then message the file to yourself to save it as a ringtone.
They did a story on this on one of my local news stations. Essentially, it has to be a smart phone for the apps to work. I don't know how true that is, but that was the info put out there. They tested a couple methods and they worked rather well. You have to gain possession of the phone and install the app for the whole thing to work....
@mariospants: That's not a MacGuffin. A MacGuffin is something that doesn't really do anything special, but drives the plot simply by being something the characters are trying to get, like Samuel L. Jackson's briefcase in Pulp Fiction. The cell phone echolocater thing was just dumb.
If someone is spying on Mr. Pi and I, they'd either be very amused by our long, in-depth conversations about Fringe or horrified that we devote so much time to discussing television as if it were a philosophical endeavor.
In any case, if someone is spying on us, they're getting nothing out of it, unless they were behind on their TV and movies and needed some reviews and recaps...or they needed recommendations on groceries, or they needed 10 minutes of us mocking Vince, the Sham Wow guy.
We're pretty boring pi people.