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March 14th, 2016 
Awake Goy
$1400 Device Can Cause LTE Mobile Phones to Use Compromised 2G Networks
March 13th, 2016
Via: Bloomberg:
Phones now operate on more sophisticated 3G and 4G (also known as LTE) networks. In theory, IMSI catchers can pinpoint only the location of these phones, not listen to calls or read texts. But none of that matters if the IMSI catcher in question can just knock a phone call back down to 2G. Enter Harris’s Hailstorm, the successor to StingRay. “It took us a while to stumble onto some documents from the DEA to see that the Hailstorm was a native LTE IMSI catcher,� the ACLU’s Soghoian says. “It was like, ‘Wait a second—I thought it’s not supposed to work on LTE. What’s going on?’?�
They found a hint to the answer last fall, when a research team out of Berlin and Helsinki announced it had built an IMSI catcher that could make an LTE phone leak its location to within a 10- to 20-meter radius—and in some cases, even its GPS coordinates. “Basically we downgraded to 2G or 3G,� says Ravishankar Borgaonkar, a 30-year-old Ph.D. who has since been hired at Oxford. “We wanted to see if the promises given by the 4G systems were correct or not.� They weren’t. The price tag for this IMSI catcher: $1,400. As long as phones retain the option of 2G, calls made on them can be downgraded. And the phone carriers can’t get rid of 2G—not if they want every phone to work everywhere. The more complex the system becomes, the more vulnerable it is. “Phones, as little computers, are becoming more and more secure,� says Karsten Nohl, chief scientist at Security Research Labs in Berlin. “But the phone networks? They’re rather becoming less secure. Not because of any one action but because there’s more and more possibility for one of these technologies to be the weakest link.�
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