Smartphones are
susceptible to malware and carriers have
enabled NSA snooping, but the prevailing wisdom has it there’s still one part of your mobile phone that remains safe and un-hackable: your SIM card.
Yet after three years of research, German cryptographer Karsten Nohl claims to have finally found encryption and software flaws that could affect millions of SIM cards, and open up another route on mobile phones for surveillance and fraud.
Nohl, who will be
presenting his findings at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas on July 31, says his is the first hack of its kind in a decade, and comes after he and his team tested close to 1,000 SIM cards for vulnerabilities, exploited by simply sending a hidden SMS. The two-part flaw, based on an old security standard and badly configured code, could allow hackers to remotely infect a SIM with a virus that sends premium text messages (draining a mobile phone bill), surreptitiously re-direct and record calls, and — with the right combination of bugs — carry out payment system fraud.
Payment fraud could be a particular problem for mobile phone users in Africa, where SIM-card based payments are widespread. The deployment of so-called NFC payment technology, already
slow to take off, could also be at risk, Nohl says, as well as the ability for carriers to track charges to each caller’s account.
Sim Cards Officially been Hacked, Millions Affected
Originally Posted by ShadowFox
