Research Says It's Fairly Easy For Hackers To Track Your Cellphone

Vulnerabilities creep in with networked devices and with the advent of smartphones, security concerns have only risen. Researchers at the University of Minnesota have discovered that malicious tracking of your cellphone is a piece of cake, afterall. Apparently, the exchange of data that happens between a phone and a GSM tower is fairly easy to hack, reports the paper "Location Leaks on the GSM Air Interface."

Cell phone towers keep a track of subscriber's cellphone in order to provide the best possible service. The tracking of cellphone is carried out via data packets that are sent from a GSM tower to a phone usually to help fix the location of the phone so that the tower knows where to redirect and allocate resources required to support a call. These data packets are also responsible for incoming calls that are intended on a user's phone.

#-Link-Snipped-#

Researchers have found that one can force cell towers to send the data and hang up, even before the recipient's phone rings. By doing so, the location of the user can be gathered without the user's permission.  Apparently, the lower layers of the GSM communication stack allow hackers to extract location information from a device. There is actually no need for support even from a cellular provider to do that as several open source software which run on "commodity" platforms provide the same prospect to anybody who wants to track a cell phone user's location allowing him to exploit the vulnerability.

According to the report, the location acquired is not pinpointed and the location data can only be determined within a 10-block radius. But I guess that's enough to stalk someone.

Source: Hackers Can Track Your Cellphone Without Your Knowledge | Tom's Guide Image Credit: #-Link-Snipped-#