With prices like these – anyone could be listening to your mobile calls!

IMSI catchers now available for EU300

With Mobile World Congress drawing to a close for another year, we were very interested to see this story, highlighted to us by one of our colleagues in Spain. It confirms what we were already well aware of; that you don’t need to be a nation state, major law enforcement (or even the now defunct News of the World!) to have the resources to tap into people’s mobile calls anymore.  IMSI catchers (see our previous blog for further explanation) can be purchased online for EU300 according to this story: http://www.elconfidencialdigital.com/seguridad/Maletines-espiar-conversaciones-moviles-euros_0_2881511824.html.  For non-Spanish speakers, Google Translate does a good job at the click of a button.

Not only are the number of attack vectors increasing exponentially, so too are the number of people/organisations/criminals able to execute these attacks. With the barrier to entry dropped so low, this means that the number of potential victims of phone tapping also increases and is now well beyond the high threat targets that we would expect (intelligence community, law enforcement, government officials, celebrities). Anyone that talks about or exchanges commercially sensitive information such as new product details, formulae, industrial secrets, or intellectual property is now at risk!

This only serves to highlight that we all need to be a lot more aware of the potential hazards with the technology we use.

And if you do fancy treating yourself to an IMSI catcher (to find out what your friends, neighbours, work colleagues are up to), you might want to consider a more streamlined rucksack than the one shown in the article!!

NOTE: Much-respected cryptography expert Bruce Schneier recognised these same risks in his blog https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/04/surveillance_an_2.html