Secure Smartphone Maker Issues Warning About Fake Cell Towers

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Fake cell towers could be attacking your smartphone between 80 to 90 times per hour, according to various media outlets, and new reports suggesting they do not appear to be instruments used by the National Security Agency (NSA) have raised the question: exactly who is responsible for installing and operating these devices?
Last week, the existence of these pseudo-cell towers was revealed to Popular Science writer Andrew Rosenblum by ESD America CEO Les Goldsmith, whose company builds and markets the ultra-secure CryptoPhone 500. While demonstrating his product’s capabilities, Goldsmith showed Rosenblum a map showing the location of phony cell towers that he and his phone’s users found spread throughout the US during the month of July alone.
These fake cell towers are known as “interceptors,” and to a typical smartphone, they look like an ordinary tower. However, once the mobile device connects with the interceptor, it can be targeted by a variety of “over-the-air” attacks, ranging from spyware attacks to eavesdropping on calls, the Popular Science reporter noted.
According to Lucian Armasu of Tom’s Hardware, “The CryptoPhone is a security-‘hardened’ Galaxy S3 device, and the company has removed 468 vulnerabilities removed from the stock operating system.” Ordinary cell phones can be targeted due to “vulnerabilities in the baseband software of the device and poor encryption algorithms,” he added.
“Most of the attacks from these fake cell towers happen against the baseband processor of the phones,” Armasu explained in a report Tuesday. “The software for these baseband processors is usually just a proprietary black box that doesn’t allow anyone to see what’s happening inside other than the company making the baseband processor or hackers who have found vulnerabilities in it.”
“Interceptor use in the U.S. is much higher than people had anticipated. One of our customers took a road trip from Florida to North Carolina and he found 8 different interceptors on that trip,” Goldsmith told Rosenblum. When asked who might be operating the fake cell towers, and for what purpose, he said that it was “suspicious… that a lot of these interceptors are right on top of US military bases… [but] we really don’t know whose they are.”
VentureBeat writer Barry Levine spoke with cloud security expert Andrew Jaquith on Tuesday, and the SilverSky CTO/SVP told him it was unlikely the towers were NSA projects. “The NSA doesn’t need a fake tower,” he told Levine. “They can just go to the carrier” to gain access to a user’s communications. Goldsmith agreed, suggesting that they could belong to the military, based on their locations, or to law enforcement agencies.
Stephen Ellis, manager of cyber threat intelligence at security firm iSIGHT Partners, told Levine that the discovery of the towers “appears to confirm real-world use of techniques that have been highlighted by researchers for years.” While he said his company could not confirm the report’s accuracy without additional research, Ellis noted that he is “highly confident” iSIGHT has “observed real-world use of this technique” by cybercriminals.
“We have observed and reported on cases in other parts of the world where actors are known to have set up fake base stations to send spoofed SMS messages, possibly to send spam or to direct unsuspecting victims to malicious websites,” he added. Levine noted that the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had recently launched a probe into the use of cell network interceptors by both criminal gangs and foreign intelligence agencies.
One warning sign that might alert users of regular, less secure smartphones is a sudden dip in network quality, explained Computerworld’s Darlene Storm. Goldsmith said that tests conducted on various devices showed that the CryptoPhone “lit up like a Christmas tree.”
An Apple iPhone reportedly had no reaction to the interceptor, he added, but a regular Samsung Galaxy S4 bounced between 4G and 3G networks, Storm said. While dipping down to 3G or even 2G could be a sign that the phone is being affected by a fake cell tower, however, she cautioned that some interceptor devices claim to be “undetectable,” meaning that this technique might not always work.
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