Spying Cell Towers May be Spread Across US

Photo Credit: REUTERS / Kacper PempelThere are at least 19 bogus cellphone towers operating across the United States that could be used to spy upon, and even hijack, passing mobile phones.

So says Les Goldsmith, head of ESD America, a company that imports and sells tightly secured mobile phones that can detect “baseband” hacking attempts. Goldsmith calls fake cell towers “interceptors.”

“Interceptor use in the U.S. is much higher than people had anticipated,” Goldsmith told Popular Science in a piece posted online last week. “One of our customers took a road trip from Florida to North Carolina, and he found eight different interceptors on that trip.”

The better to spy on you with

Cellphones communicate with cellular-service towers using the baseband processor, a chip that controls some or all of the radio signals sent to and from the device. Baseband processors run their own operating systems and are made by a handful of companies that zealously protect their trade secrets; not even phone makers know exactly how the baseband processors work.

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