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What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?

thehftguy.com

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Re: What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?

#71

Post by privong »

liprais wrote: post #40

this method will only work with GSM network because 1.GSM networks doesn't verify BTS 2.GSM encrypt keys are cracked and all over the internet. Users of other kind of networks should not worry about this kind of hack. Actually here in China a fake BTS a.k.a 伪基站 can be easily purchased online.

> Users of other kind of networks should not worry about this kind of hack.

The article is not about a hack. The article is about how the cell company or state-level actor can leverage the connectivity information that is required for any modern cell service to operate.

Re: What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?

#72

Post by pdoege »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #39

I've designed systems that do this on continental scales (i.e. hundreds of millions of cell phones simultaneously, in real-time). The devil is in the details and non-trivial; this is not a "an intern and 6 months" job. Mobile telemetry is not nearly as ideal in practice as assumed here and it typically takes a couple years to learn how to handle the numerous peculiar artifacts of that data that will damage the qualit…

Carrier iQ demonstrated GPS level tracking of 100m+ phones nearly 10 years ago.

Re: What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?

#73

Post by jandrewrogers »

awkwarddaturtle wrote: post #69
jandrewrogers wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not written about it. Most of the difficulty and complexity, from my perspective, is in the data science and processing required to construct an accurate population model, which requires additional data sources beyond the mobile telemetry. I designed the custom database platforms (easy for me) underneath which supported the online data processing. It isn't that difficult technically, if you have experts doing…

> which requires additional data sources beyond the mobile telemetry. So it really isn't technically difficult. It's just lacking in data? In your original post, you made it seem like it was extremely difficult. From my perspective, it seems like child's play from a technical standpoint. > It isn't that difficult technically, if you have experts doing it But your top comment implied it was extremely technically diffi…

The are some things that are technically very difficult if you have no domain expertise, which applies to the subject matter. Most people that try to do this without experience fail in practice, it takes a lot of time and effort to become competent at it, but once you figure it out it is repeatable without too much effort.

There is a much smaller set of things that are technically difficult to execute even if you are highly experienced at doing it -- each time is a challenge. This is not one of those cases, it just has a severe learning curve.

Re: What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?

#74

Post by compuguy »

user5994461 wrote: post #57
dajohnson89 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm gonna take a wild guess, and say that the NSA has a monopoly on the talent for this field.

Mapping is wide and common industry, just like web or finance. The NSA only recruits in the USA. It's a fraction of the talent pool of the planet.

Its actually smaller. At minimum you have to be a naturalized or native born citizen of the USA for many jobs in the US Government. For the NSA, add the requirement of having a current clearance or the time to get one (worst case years).

Re: What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?

#76

Post by girvo »

rsync wrote: post #49
liprais wrote: post #40

this method will only work with GSM network because 1.GSM networks doesn't verify BTS 2.GSM encrypt keys are cracked and all over the internet. Users of other kind of networks should not worry about this kind of hack. Actually here in China a fake BTS a.k.a 伪基站 can be easily purchased online.

"this method will only work with GSM network because ..." Yes, that's true - but remember that all of our 3G/4G phones are also 2G phones and that if you disable/jam/overpower the 3G/4G signals the phone will very happily revert down to 2G, possibly with no encryption, and possibly in a way that you have to be very careful to even notice. There are quite a few attacks that are mitigated by 3G/4G in theory, but in pra…

Interestingly, the 2G networks are being (or have? I can't remember which) shut down entirely here in Australia.

Re: What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?

#77

Post by thinkfurther »

devrandomguy wrote: post #15

A: A deeply sociopathic mindset. See the requirements section for details.

This is "off-topic" to the attention span of HN. I recently realized this when someone mentioned corruption as the main problem of some issue; yeah, that's "very general", but nevermind programmers, not even a power user would keep looking for program bugs or worry about the order they do things in when it's already been confirmed that the memory or PSU or something like that is faulty. Anyone worth their salt would stop those other debug activities to focus on correcting that, while someone who absorbed these broken parts and/or their acceptance as part of their synthetic identity will do anything but that.

Also see Hannah Arendt, Erich Fromm, et al. This other mediocre shit? This being a "hacker" in a goldfish bowl? That's for those who can't hack the adult responsibilities of the 20th and 21th centuries. those who fell asleep, those who already fell off. They will downvote you today and look the other way as drones take care of you tomorrow, don't hold your breath for anything else. Anything else, any future worth a fuck, has to be done despite their wishes, or rather, despite where they are drifting.

Re: What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?

#78

Post by greenleafjacob »

tinix wrote: post #59
harlanji wrote: post #51

I did the math a while back, don't have the notes at the moment, but scaling an AWS system I built enough to collect 600m points of data each minute and compute on data within 100ms and retain it for a few minutes would run a bit over $10k usd/mo to operate. I operated it at about 3m events/min with a good amount of compute per including ip to geo lookup... Zookeeper would be the only bottleneck in this case assuming…

Using AWS is the problem here, and that's why it's so expensive. You could do this on bare metal WAY faster and more efficiently, and then you own the hardware forever, for the price you paid to do it for a month with a third party. AWS does not scale this way, you can't just throw more resources at a problem and expect to be profitable.

You would own the hardware until it died which is not forever.

Re: What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?

#79

Post by rasz »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #5
warrenm wrote: post #2

The 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.

repo men usually have someone able to do this for $50-200

Re: What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?

#80

Post by tinix »

greenleafjacob wrote: post #78
tinix wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using AWS is the problem here, and that's why it's so expensive. You could do this on bare metal WAY faster and more efficiently, and then you own the hardware forever, for the price you paid to do it for a month with a third party. AWS does not scale this way, you can't just throw more resources at a problem and expect to be profitable.

You would own the hardware until it died which is not forever.

Just because it quits working doesn't mean you don't still own it. Might wanna lay off the green leaf, bro. Hahaha
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