After my post yesterday, I had a thought, "What about all those other areas of interest I mentioned I would talk about originally?" and since phone hacking has been on the news quite a lot, it seems pertinent to share a group project with you.
This year I studied a module called Information Security lectured by the Computer Science department. These lectures went alongside a group research project on a related subject of choice. Our group chose, "GSM Security". GSM is the global standard system for mobile communications and because of this the system's security is important to 90% of the population of the world (that means you!). GSM has been widely studied both academically and also practically (by ethical hackers).
Our task was to present an up-do-date image of the security measures, vulnerabilities and threats on GSM. The paper produced is available for you to read. It's not as detailed as we originally made it because we had a page limit (lame!) but it gets the main points across. We also got a fantastic mark for it!
After reading it you will have a better idea of how people (including journalists) can access personal information from your phone, listen into calls or prevent use of the phone.
Now, a disclaimer: I don't know if any of these methods presented were actually the ones thought to be used by the accused journalists or if they are guilty of phone hacking. I'm just presenting our research.
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