What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?
thehftguy.com
What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?
1–10 of 88 posts
Re: What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?
#2The phone companies already do this, more or less, as is shown in court cases where cell phone records are brought in as evidence
A decade ago that data was a little more iffy (i.e. it was more a good estimate (typically within half a mile or less) than a true location), but with a combination of more towers (and therefore more data points), the ubiquity of smartphones (which check in more often, are doing geolocation related things, etc), and better / more accessible/well-known analytics tools, is think even 6 months would be a generous time-frame
Re: What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?
#3Note that a lot of the information from the BTS is already available to anyone who "asks nicely".
The mechanism that provides roaming is based on trust, so anyone connected to the SS7 network can query the location of any phone in the world and even intercept its calls. Just say to the home carrier "hey this phone is roaming on my network, would you be able to send me all of its calls and texts?".
Re: What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?
#4Q. What Does It Really Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?
A. Sell outsourced billing solutions to the mobile carrier. (See AMDOCS)
Re: What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?
#5The phone companies already do this, more or less, as is shown in court cases where cell phone records are brought in as evidence A decade ago that data was a little more iffy (i.e. it was more a good estimate (typically within half a mile or less) than a true location), but with a combination of more towers (and therefore more data points), the ubiquity of smartphones (which check in more often, are doing geolocatio…
> The phone companies already do this, more or less, as is shown in court cases where cell phone records are brought in as evidence
You can also arrange to buy this information. I worked for a place where you could request someone's location by phone number. There were a lot of contractual obligations around us having the phone owner "allow" us to do that, but no technical ones.
Re: What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?
#6Note that a lot of the information from the BTS is already available to anyone who "asks nicely". The mechanism that provides roaming is based on trust, so anyone connected to the SS7 network can query the location of any phone in the world and even intercept its calls. Just say to the home carrier "hey this phone is roaming on my network, would you be able to send me all of its calls and texts?".
There was a talk/demo I saw a few years ago that went into great detail about how this works. I remember it was given by a German. Anyone know what I am talking about?
Edit: It was a video.
Re: What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?
#7Note that a lot of the information from the BTS is already available to anyone who "asks nicely". The mechanism that provides roaming is based on trust, so anyone connected to the SS7 network can query the location of any phone in the world and even intercept its calls. Just say to the home carrier "hey this phone is roaming on my network, would you be able to send me all of its calls and texts?".
There was a talk/demo I saw a few years ago that went into great detail about how this works. I remember it was given by a German. Anyone know what I am talking about? Edit: It was a video.
I remember something similar, it was a presentation given at CCC in Germany. Tried searching for it on their YouTube channel, just to discover said channel was terminated for breaking YouTube ToS?!
That's really sad, their channel had videos of all the past talks from the CCC, an amazing resource that's now gone.
I think this is the one you might have been talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsIriAdbttc
If it's not that one then it's probably one of the "Running your own 3G/3,5G/GSM network" talks.
Re: What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?
#8Note that a lot of the information from the BTS is already available to anyone who "asks nicely". The mechanism that provides roaming is based on trust, so anyone connected to the SS7 network can query the location of any phone in the world and even intercept its calls. Just say to the home carrier "hey this phone is roaming on my network, would you be able to send me all of its calls and texts?".
There was a talk/demo I saw a few years ago that went into great detail about how this works. I remember it was given by a German. Anyone know what I am talking about? Edit: It was a video.
Probably Karsten Nohl.
He has done many SS7 talks, so this may not be the exact one you saw: https://youtu.be/BbPLscWQ1Bw
Re: What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?
#9Note that a lot of the information from the BTS is already available to anyone who "asks nicely". The mechanism that provides roaming is based on trust, so anyone connected to the SS7 network can query the location of any phone in the world and even intercept its calls. Just say to the home carrier "hey this phone is roaming on my network, would you be able to send me all of its calls and texts?".
Which is also why SMS makes a poor authentication factor.
Re: What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was a talk/demo I saw a few years ago that went into great detail about how this works. I remember it was given by a German. Anyone know what I am talking about? Edit: It was a video.
I remember something similar, it was a presentation given at CCC in Germany. Tried searching for it on their YouTube channel, just to discover said channel was terminated for breaking YouTube ToS?! That's really sad, their channel had videos of all the past talks from the CCC, an amazing resource that's now gone. I think this is the one you might have been talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsIriAdbttc If…
Maybe it's this one https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7412-running_your_own_3g_3_5g_ne...?