Category Archives: Mobile

New Android Malware/Trojan Records Your Phone Calls

AndroidtrojanNews out of the CA Security Advisor Blog today is that there is a new piece of Android malware that records phone calls that you make on an Android phone. The post author, Dinesh Venkatesan, goes into some detail about what they found – and how they found it – in testing this malware.

While this is not a “VoIP” issue, per se, as the trojan seems to record calls over the “regular” phone connection it is a general communications security issue and something we all have to watch out for. Over on the ReadWriteWeb, Dan Rowinski published a good piece putting this malware in context with other recent Android malware.

The net of both posts is that ultimately you need to be extremely careful about the source of applications you are installing on your Android phone – and what permissions you are granting them.

Meanwhile, I expect that we’ll continue to more creativity coming out of the attacker community..

Image credit: CA Security Advisor Blog

GSM Encryption Cracked – Eavesdropping Now Possible

Last Friday there was news out of the Chaos Computer Club Congress in Berlin that two security researchers, Karsten Nohl and Sylvian Munaut, had successfully cracked the encryption used in the GSM cellular network. While not “VoIP”, per se, this is of interest to any of us working with VoIP as many VoIP clients are now working on “smartphones” running on top of the GSM network (like, oh, the iPhone, among others). Some of the articles on this topic:

The researchers are apparently not releasing their toolkit publicly, but obviously word of their success will encourage others to investigate further.

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