You know those scenes in the movies where a hacker pounds a few commands on a keyboard and effortlessly pinpoints a person's location? It turns out that real life hackers can actually do that.
Researchers have discovered an encryption flaw in both 3G and 4G LTE wireless networks that could allow someone to track a phone's location. This isn't just an oversight by a single carrier, either. As ZDNet's Zack Whittaker points out, it's an issue with 3G and 4G protocols.
As a result, University of Oxford research fellow Ravishankar Borgaonkar told Whittaker that every carrier in the world that runs a 3G or 4G LTE network is susceptible. By monitoring activities like the sending and receiving of text messages and placement of phone calls an attacker could track the physical location of a device.
Things aren't quite as bad as they appear on the surface. The flaw doesn't allow calls or text messages to be intercepted, and Borgaonkar and a team of German researchers had to build a dedicated piece of hardware to perform their proof-of-concept attacks.
What may worry those of you who are privacy-focused is that their equipment only cost about $1500 to build. That's small change to any law enforcement agency, even local police departments. Stingray devices are already being used more and more frequently and the thought of additional snooping is an unnerving one.
Unfortunately, Borgaonkar and his team say there's really no way to defend against this kind of tracking. He and others in the security community are hopeful that the 5G networks carriers will soon begin rolling out will plug the hole.
