After 175 million failed password guesses, a judge rules that the Canadian police must return a suspect’s phone. [Judge] Carter said the investigation can continue without the phones, and he noted that Ottawa police have made a formal request to obtain more data from Google. “This strikes me …
Interesting forensics in connection with a serial killer arrest: Investigators went through phone records collected from both midtown Manhattan and the Massapequa Park area of Long Island—two areas connected to a “burner phone” they had tied to the killings. (In court, prosecutors later said the burner phone was …
The French police are getting new surveillance powers : French police should be able to spy on suspects by remotely activating the camera, microphone and GPS of their phones and other devices, lawmakers agreed late on Wednesday, July 5. [...] Covering laptops, cars and other connected objects as well as phones …
The FBI is warning people against using public phone-charging stations, worrying that the combination power-data port can be used to inject malware onto the devices: Avoid using free charging stations in airports, hotels, or shopping centers. Bad actors have figured out ways to use public USB ports to introduce …
The two people who shut down four Washington power stations in December were arrested. This is the interesting part: Investigators identified Greenwood and Crahan almost immediately after the attacks took place by using cell phone data that allegedly showed both men in the vicinity of all four substations, according …
They’re using commercial phones, which go through the Ukrainian telecom network : “You still have a lot of soldiers bringing cellphones to the frontline who want to talk to their families and they are either being intercepted as they go through a Ukrainian telecommunications provider or intercepted over the …
Everyone visiting Qatar for the World Cup needs to install spyware on their phone. Everyone travelling to Qatar during the football World Cup will be asked to download two apps called Ehteraz and Hayya. Briefly, Ehteraz is an covid-19 tracking app, while Hayya is an official World Cup app …
The Washington Post is reporting that the US Customs and Border Protection agency is seizing and copying cell phone, tablet, and computer data from “as many as” 10,000 phones per year, including an unspecified number of American citizens. This is done without a warrant, because “...courts have long …
Twilio was hacked earlier this month, and the phone numbers of 1,900 Signal users were exposed : Here’s what our users need to know: All users can rest assured that their message history, contact lists, profile information, whom they’d blocked, and other personal data remain private and …
China is mandating that athletes download and use a health and travel app when they attend the Winter Olympics next month. Citizen Lab examined the app and found it riddled with security holes. Key Findings: MY2022, an app mandated for use by all attendees of the 2022 Olympic Games …
A January 2021 FBI document outlines what types of data and metadata can be lawfully obtained by the FBI from messaging apps. Rolling Stone broke the story and it’s been written about elsewhere. I don’t see a lot of surprises in the document. Lots of apps leak …
Interesting Twitter thread on how cell phone metadata can be used to identify and track people who don’t want to be identified and tracked. [...]
Vice has a detailed article about how the FBI gets data from cell phone providers like AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, based on a leaked (I think) 2019 139-page presentation. [...]
Isracard used a single cell phone to communicate with credit card clients, and receive documents via WhatsApp. An employee stole the phone. He reformatted the SIM, which was oddly the best possible outcome, given the circumstances. Using the data to steal money would have been much worse. Here’s …
Seems that 47 million customers were affected. Surprising no one, T-Mobile had awful security. I’ve lost count of how many times T-Mobile has been hacked. [...]
A Catholic priest was outed through commercially available surveillance data. Vice has a good analysis : The news starkly demonstrates not only the inherent power of location data, but how the chance to wield that power has trickled down from corporations and intelligence agencies to essentially any sort of disgruntled …
Motherboard got its hands on one of those Anom phones that were really FBI honeypots. The details are interesting. [...]
In this entertaining story of French serial criminal Rédoine Faïd and his jailbreaking ways, there’s this bit about cell phone surveillance: After Faïd’s helicopter breakout, 3,000 police officers took part in the manhunt. According to the 2019 documentary La Traque de Rédoine Faïd, detective units scoured …
A newspaper in Malaysia is reporting on a cell phone cloning scam. The scammer convinces the victim to lend them their cell phone, and the scammer quickly clones it. What’s clever about this scam is that the victim is an Uber driver and the scammer is the passenger …
Vice is reporting on a cell phone vulnerability caused by commercial SMS services. One of the things these services permit is text message forwarding. It turns out that with a little bit of anonymous money — in this case, $16 off an anonymous prepaid credit card — and a few lies …
We all know that our cell phones constantly give our location away to our mobile network operators; that’s how they work. A group of researchers has figured out a way to fix that. “Pretty Good Phone Privacy” (PGPP) protects both user identity and user location using the existing …