I am quite sure that many of us value our privacy a great deal, and to hear that there is this PRISM program that has been going on for quite some time is definitely not something that everyone would greet with open arms. Well, apart from the government being just about capable of reading your emails and dropping in on your conversations if you happen to be a high profile target of theirs (they just don’t have the manpower to track every single person), here is another potential threat from your smartphone – apparently, a German cryptographer touts to have successfully hacked a SIM card.
It seems that this is the first reported instance of a successful SIM card hacking session, as the founder of Security Research Labs in Berlin, Karsten Nohl, shared that after having studied the encryption methods in thousands of SIM cards, he managed to find a way to locate the card’s unique 56-digit access key. Should the knowledge and technical know-how of this vulnerability be widespread, it could affect as many as 750 million phones, where these numbers would be vulnerable to call surveillance, fraudulent purchases and form even a kind of identity theft. Sometimes, living as a hermit does sound appealing, no?
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