Friday, 10 July 2009

Mobile phone "tapping"

Am I the only one who's annoyed by the press reports that describe the News Of The World's antics as "Phone tapping". In my (maybe slightly geeky) mind, phone tapping consists of breaking into the green CAB box at the end of someone's street to fix a bug on their landline, or using a scanner back in the old days of analogue mobile phones, or some very complicated and expensive equipment now to decrypt GSM.

Actually all they did was "hack" into the relevant people's voicemail. In fairness, they didn't even have to hack it, all they did was dial the number, wait for it to go to voicemail, then press * or # or whatever the network requires you to do, then enter the PIN, which probably hasn't been changed from the default, and then presto - listen to messages.

It's hardly rocket science.

I agree with Obo here, if someone's too fucking stupid not to change their default PIN on their voicemail, then they deserve everything they get. I can also confidently share his prediction that there will be media whores claiming they were hacked when in fact they weren't.

2 comments:

banned said...

This story has been lurking around for months, why did it choose to surface this week except to provide Prescott an excuse to parade as a 'victim' ?

He demanded action from the Chief Of Police, must be watching too many American cop movies.

Anonymous said...

Remember Paris & password Tinkerbell?
All as you say media whoring numbnuts and hypritical twats