Hacking mobile phone voicemails

[Michael Chare]

Are (or were) mobile phone's voicemails hacked because people don't change the default pin?

[Rod Speed]

Michael Chare [e-mail] wrote

And when it was easily guessable.

[John Rumm]

Pretty much, yup. The phrase "hacking" is over egging it a bit!

[GB]

My office answering machine would play back all its messages over the phone. It just required a single tone of the right frequency to get it to spill the beans. It came with a little tone generator that I had to apply to the phone mouthpiece.

[The Natural Philosopher]

IIRC it was a 4 digit number so only 9999 combinations to try Starting with 0000,1111,2222,etc. Early phones were unencrypted and analogue so could easily be overheard And judging by the number of conversations in Ukraine being uploaded, the cell tower company also has access to unencrypted voice traffic.

[Rod Speed]

No they don't.

[Jeff Gaines]

Isn't that 10,000? I ran out of fingers trying to work it out :-)

[Brian Gaff]

Probably, but surely modern phones are more secure by design and you would need te phone to get at them. Your question really raises more questions before one could answer. I'm assuming you mean where some systems allow you to hear the voicemails from another line by dialling in with a password and supplying the number associated with it. That is never going to be secure as somebody can just watch what you type if its a mobile out of doors. Brian

[Theo]

It's because remote access to voicemails was a feature not many people used, so they didn't even know there was a PIN, let alone that it was set to the default. You didn't need the PIN to access voicemails from the handset, which is how most people used them.

So any random person could call up the remote access number, enter the phone number they wanted to listen to, then the default PIN, and they were in.

There were also analogue cordless phones that could be intercepted with a radio receiver or scanner (I had a portable radio that went off the top of the MW band to around 1900kHz and that could do it), but that was a different thing.

Theo

[David Wade]

Nope, you can still access your voicemails from any phone, provided you have set and know the pin. In the times when this was happening the pin was pre-set to "0000" so as long as you know some ones mobile, and they hadn't changed the PIN you could access their e-mails. These days you have to set the pin first.

As far as I know all mobile systems have this facility. I doubt a prince would check his voice mails in public.

Dave

[The Natural Philosopher]

It is of course. 0000 is one...

[The Natural Philosopher]

And Harry isn't the brightest bulb in the box.

I very much doubt that the newspapers themselves hacked anything. Far more likely a man in a dirty raincoat said 'pssst, Ive got some info on where Harry is going to be: toss us a pony' and they did. No questions asked.

[Jeff Gaines]

Ah, another programmer :-)

[John Rumm]

ISTR the first one I had did similar - you needed to dial a two digit code to get it to playback. If your phone supported DTMF (less common at the time) then you could key it on the phone - otherwise you had to use the stand-alone tone dialler.

[Rod Speed]

Corse they could when they have calls divert to voicemail when involved in some important event and then need to check what has arrived during the event.

[ARW]

Always try an elderly persons alarm code with 19xy with the x normally been a 3 or 4.

[John Rumm]

or as I discovered when leaving a care home[1] the other day, the codes on the exit doors were all dates from the 60's to the 80's. Presumably chosen to be memorable for the cohort likely to have parents resident in such places.

[1] Client could not get his iPad to print to his wireless printer...

[Michael Chare]

So I wonder why the Mirror Group legal defence did not ask Harry if he had changed the default PIN which many people woild know?

[Robin]

"Harry made it easy" is no defence to unlawful access. C.f. "I wouldn't have nicked it if he hadn't left the door unlocked" or "dressed like that she was asking for it".

[Rod Speed]

Because they are useless legal parasites.