Chris Paget, a researcher by profession has now come up with an all new low cost system, that is more than capable of intercepting cell phone calls and has been disguised as a cell phone base station, and fools the cell phones in recognizing the system as a cell phone tower, and lets the phones route the outbound calls through the system. The system has been designed and developed to snatch voice calls, even the encrypted ones as well.

The intercepted calls, especially the encrypted ones are then tricked into disabling the encryption algorithms, there by providing the operator this system with call details and content that can even be recorded  After the interception, the voice calls are then immediately routed to their proper channels via voice-over-IP. This system which has been created with simple materials is found to be just about in the same league as that of the communication interception devices currently used by numerous intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies. The current generation systems, also known as IMSI catchers send in signals to mobile phones, that are stronger than the conventional GSM towers, thereby fooling the devices into sending the outbound calls to these devices, which are later sent to the GSM towers, after successful interception.

According to Chris Paget,

“If you have the ability to deliver a reasonably strong signal, then those around are owned. Any information that goes across a cell phone you can now intercept. Even though the GSM spec requires it, this is a deliberate choice on the cell phone makers.”

Via Gizmodo