How Are Mobile Phones Hacked?
You may or may not be aware of the recent phone hacking events with the UK newspaper - The News of the World. Anyway, it involved someone hacking into somebodies mobile phone and listening to their voicemail. I was just wondering, how do you hack into a phone and listen to calls or voicemail?
Is it as easy as installing certain software onto the target's phone? I've heard about cloning and things too... I dunno. Just seems crazy how someone can do it without the victim even knowing about it. Any info? I know there must be some phreakers out there
Is it as easy as installing certain software onto the target's phone? I've heard about cloning and things too... I dunno. Just seems crazy how someone can do it without the victim even knowing about it. Any info? I know there must be some phreakers out there
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Also, I know that with AT&T, the mailbox is disabled by default. The caller will get an automated recording saying "the voicemail box hasn't been set up. good bye." Once the person set a password, the box will be enabled.
A lot of people use their birthday or last 4 digits of their SSN as a voiemail password. Also, I don't think voicemail boxes locked the person out back then, so it wouldn't be hard to launch a dial campaign to test the possible 1000 passwords.
They have gotten call recording working on Android, so I'm sure there is a rogue app that secretly records all phone calls and ftp's them off somewhere, all in the background. 99% of Android users don't know what "ROM" means, so I doubt they would notice such an app running in the background...
Too bad I haven't bothered learning how to program. I have a lot of good app ideas.
If you can get physical access to the phone, you can sideload the APK. If sideloading is blocked like on AT&T Android phones, you can install the APK with ADB. You could also trick the user into downloading and installing it (good luck with that one).
If you are really brave you can publish the app in the Market disguised as something else. Get your target to download it and then remove it from the Market. There should be some way to send a command to a specific phone to uninstall the app (to cover tracks when you are done or to remove accidental installations, etc).
Also, it's hard to say how much of this will actually work on a non-rooted phone. Rooting is usually a data-destructive process and takes awhile, so there really isn't a "quickly root the phone while preserving their data and loading the app" option.
Now that I think about it, if you are serious about a target and have the necessary funds, you can send them a "pre-configured" brand new phone in the mail and say they won the phone in a random contest with a free year of cell service. They will no doubt switch over to the "free" phone, because people want free shit. This reminds me of the old trick where when you want to sift through someone's trash and they live in an apartment complex with shared dumpsters, you give out free boxes of black trash bags to the surrounding neighbors, but you give a box of <insert non-common color here> bags to your target. Then you know which bags to target in the dumpster.
Do you know what programming language you write applications in? I know you can get an SDK for the Android which allows you to make applications but I dunno how much coding it lets you do. To be honest, I don't know much about it all really. If I found out some stuff, maybe I could start learning the language. I already have some programming experience so I guess it shouldn't be too difficult
An APK is an Android package file. Kinda like a self-extracting zip that installs an application. People pirate APK files and share applications, which is why Android isn't popular with developers (no app security/lockdown like iOS). Android phones have an option to enable "sideloading", which basically means you are allowed to put/download an APK to your phone and manually install it. If sideloading is blocked (like on AT&T phones), your only option is to install an app through the Android Market (which the carriers filter) or push the file with ADB.
ADB is part of the Android SDK. It is basically a Swiss army knife command line utility that lets you telnet to the phone, copy files to/from the phone, install APKs directly to the phone, lock/unlock bootloaders, etc. You can pretty much control any USB-attached Android phone with it. The only caveat is that the "debugging" option must be selected on the phone in order to ADB into the phone. If the phone's screen is locked and debugging isn't enabled, you probably can't ADB into it.
I believe Java is the main programming language for Android, and the apps are launched through the Dalvik virtual machine (someone correct me if I'm wrong). This ensures compatibility across phones/tablets/etc.
The free Android SDK has an Android emulator that you can run on your computer to test apps. I believe you can even get Market access in the emulator.
If there is any confusion, "rooting" your phone means that you gain access to the root filesytem "/". Most parts of the filesystem are off limits on a stock Android phone. Some phones are very easy to root, and others take a couple hours and require downloading almost a gig of ROM images (older versions with exploits and newer versions once rooted).
XDA Developers is the largest phone "hacker" forum: http://forum.xda-developers.com