In 2012, the Wall Street Journal first reported on a mysterious cellphone surveillance tool being used by law-enforcement; years later, we learned that the origin of this report was an obsessive jailhouse lawyer who didn’t believe that the cops had caught him the way they said they had.
Continue reading “EFF publishes an indispensable, plain-language guide to “cell-site simulators”: the surveillance devices that track you via your phone”
Tag: stingrays
Hong Kong’s #612strike uprising is alive to surveillance threats, but its countermeasures are woefully inadequate
The millions of Hong Kong people participating in the #612strike uprising are justifiably worried about state retaliation, given the violent crackdowns on earlier uprisings like the Umbrella Revolution and Occupy Central; they’re also justifiably worried that they will be punished after the fact.
Continue reading “Hong Kong’s #612strike uprising is alive to surveillance threats, but its countermeasures are woefully inadequate”
Major vulnerability in 5G means that anyone with $500 worth of gear can spy on a wide area’s mobile activity
Stingrays (AKA IMSI catchers) are a widespread class of surveillance devices that target cellular phones by impersonating cellular towers to them (they’re also called “cell-site simulators”).
Continue reading “Major vulnerability in 5G means that anyone with $500 worth of gear can spy on a wide area’s mobile activity”
For $20, you can make a DIY Stingray in minutes, using parts from Amazon
Stingrays were once the most secretive of surveillance technology: devices whose existence was so sensitive that the feds actually raided local cops and stole their crime files to stop them from being introduced in court and revealing the capability to spy on cellular phones.
Continue reading “For $20, you can make a DIY Stingray in minutes, using parts from Amazon”
This year’s Electromagnetic Field hacker campout demonstrated the awesome power of DIY cellphones and DIY stingrays
Every year, security researchers, hardware hackers and other deep geeks from around the world converge on an English nature reserve for Electromagnetic Field, a hacker campout where participants show off and discuss their research and creations.
Continue reading “This year’s Electromagnetic Field hacker campout demonstrated the awesome power of DIY cellphones and DIY stingrays”
News crew discovers 40 cellphone-tracking devices operating around DC
An NBC investigative journalism team and a security researcher went wardriving around the DC area with a cell-site-simulator detector that would tell them whenever they came in range of a fake cellphone tower that tried to trick their phones into connecting to it in order to covertly track their locations (some cell site simulators can also hack phones to spy on SMS, calls and data).
Continue reading “News crew discovers 40 cellphone-tracking devices operating around DC”
Oakland passes groundbreaking municipal law requiring citizen oversight of local surveillance
Oakland, California — a city across the bay from San Francisco whose large African-American population has struggled with gentrification and police violence for decades — has a long reputation for police corruption and surveillance.
Continue reading “Oakland passes groundbreaking municipal law requiring citizen oversight of local surveillance”
In 2009 a NJ judge banned hooking up voting machines to the internet, but that’s exactly how ES&S’s “airgapped” machines work
Connecting voting machines to the internet is a terrible idea: the machines are already notoriously insecure, and once they’re online, anyone, anywhere in the world becomes a potential attacker.
Continue reading “In 2009 a NJ judge banned hooking up voting machines to the internet, but that’s exactly how ES&S’s “airgapped” machines work”
Canada’s Mounties use a 6-year-old “interim policy” to justify warrantless mass surveillance
In 2016, Motherboard used public records requests to receive 3,000 pages of documents from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police detailing the federal police agency’s longstanding secret use of IMSI Catchers (AKA “Stingrays” — the fake cellular towers that silently capture data on every cellphone user in range).
Continue reading “Canada’s Mounties use a 6-year-old “interim policy” to justify warrantless mass surveillance”
It’s not hard to think of ways to outsmart Stingray-detector apps
A group of researchers from Oxford and TU Berlin will present their paper, White-Stingray: Evaluating IMSI Catchers Detection Applications at the Usenix Workshop on Offensive Technologies, demonstrating countermeasures that Stingray vendors could use to beat Stingrays and other “cell-site simulators” (AKA IMSI catchers).
Continue reading “It’s not hard to think of ways to outsmart Stingray-detector apps”