A New Threat To Cell Phone Security From An Old Source—The Hacker

Nothing stays safe forever, at least not in the world of information technology and digital communication. Hackers are able to break into sophisticated bank security systems and steal money. Talented coders recently shut down services like Twitter and hackers from North Korea menaced some US government websites.

Sometimes hackers work just for fun but many do it for the chance to get rich. Most hardcore hackers don’t care about pay. They love the challenge, the math, the programming languages which are all set up to keep them outside the wall. Solving the puzzle to get in is the fun of it, the real intellectual work.

Most hackers are in their twenties and Scandinavian. There must be something about the public school mathematics courses or the computer science classes in that part of the world. The latest really heroic hack came from close by Germany, and the magician was only 21 years old. Karsten Nohl broke the encryption code that protects most of the world’s cell phones.  The GSM algorithm was first created in 1988. It must have been very well designed to have remained invulnerable from episodic hacker assaults for so long a period.

The cellular system operators around the world now have a severe problem. The GSM Association called the hack action illegal and said it could not see why anyone would be malicious enough to use it to threaten the security of consumer wireless communications. That assumes far too much. There has to be one malicious character among all the hackers in the world who would like to threaten the privacy of wireless voice communication and get access to data which is currently assumed to be private as well.

Nohl has put his code up on BitTorrent, one of the largest file-sharing services in the world. It will only be a matter of a few days before intelligent software coders all over the world will have access to it. Phone technology experts say that hackers are still not in a position to intercept calls, but, with scores of people playing with Nohl’s code, the day when someone can “listen in” on a wireless call is not far off. The New York Times points out that a well-funded criminal organization could set up a system to tap into government or intelligence agency calls.

The handset companies like Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Nokia (NYSE:NOK), and carriers including Sprint (NYSE:S) and AT&T (NYSE:T) will not send out alarms or warnings to their customers, and they do not need to, at this point. But, it will not be very long before a group of misbehaved or malevolent software code experts sets themselves up with electronic equipment in a big city like London or New York and start listening to random calls. Soon the listening will become focused. Some calls will be worth more than others.

Douglas A. McIntyre