It's funny, Oslo did an experiment a while ago to see how many IMSI catchers (fake cellphone towers to track everyone nearby) were used around the city

The experiment showed so many IMSI catchers that the researches thought their equipment was malfunctioning.

Actually, the whole fucking city was rigged with the catchers.

That's spooky :x

Goodbye privacy I guess :(

Holy shit that's insane. It's sad that there are still a lot of people who look at you in a weird way when you tell them that you care about privacy and don't use things like Snapchat, or google

@linuxxx did you find out about this in the documentation you just watched?

How would they identify you tho? I guess they would get your IMEI number but how would they tie that to you?

Also, I wonder how they detected you. Was it like an ARP spoofing attack where they trick you into connecting to their tower? How would they then carry the signal forward? Was it like a blind proxy that just sends data on to the legit mast?

As you can see I'm far more interested in how these things work 😄

@404response Other documentary but also on mass surveillance yes!

@Froot every IMEI number is bound to a phone number/simcard. Every phone automatically searches for new cellphone towers and tries to connect to them. So even if those aren't real towers (imsi catchers) the cellphose try to connect to them anyways and that authentication attempt is saved on the catchers!

@linuxxx True that it's bound but is that info public? I didn't think it was. I mean, if it's stored away in some telco's database it's quite useless to the attacker since he can't access it.

I know but don't phones prefer a tower from their carrier by default? The attacker would have had to break that preference somehow. Like in an ARP spoof attack

Creepy

Do you have a source for it, like a newspaper or research article, I'd like to read up on it.