Two minute sim card hacked

Tuesday 23 July 2013

Two minute sim card hacked

A two minute SIM card hack could allow an intruder to listen to your phonecalls, send text messages from your phone number and make mobile payments from your simcard.The vulnerability,discovered by a German security researcher,is presentin an estimated 750 million SIM cards around the world which could be vulnerable. The vulnerability was discovered by Karsten Nohl, founder of Security Research Labs in Berlin – the man who, create a tool to break the GSM encryption,enabling anyone with a scanner and a laptop to listen in to cellphone calls. The system used to encrypt GSM calls was strengthened as a result of his work. This new vulnerability relates to the encryption system used on SIM cards. Nohl found that by sending a fake carrier text message to a phone, in about25 percent of cases the phone would reply with an error message that revealed the 56-bit security key for the SIM. A second text message claiming to be a software update,and which the SIM would accept because it usedthe encryption key, would then allow a virus to be installed which would allow a hacker to listen to a call of the infected sim,it can send text message, pay bill etc. The system works only with SIM cards using an older encryption method known as Data EncryptionStandard,or DES. More modern SIMs use stronger encryption methods,which cannot be hacked in the sameway, but there’s no way to tell which system your SIM uses. Nohl will report this findings in detail at the Black Hat security conference in August,but he has already provided details to mobile operators so that they can address the vulnerability. A spokes person for the GSM Association said: We should find out at the conference whether or not this is the case …
Stay tuned for the more update as we will try to update it as soon as we get more info.