GSM telephony, a popular communication technology spanning most countries and connecting more than 4 billion devices, is vulnerable to widespread attack, a German security expert said today.
Any phone on any GSM network is open to attack, said Karsten Nohl, head of Germany’s Security Research Labs.
“The new attack — which Nohl did not publish — allows hackers to control hundreds of thousands of mobile phones at once,” British news outlet Daily Mail reported on its website.
The Daily Mail reported that the attack allows hackers complete control over the handsets and could be used to make or send texts to premium phone and messaging services.
“We can do it to hundreds of thousands of phones in a short time frame,” Nohl said at a convention in Berlin, according to the Daily Mail.
Security Research Labs said that the security standards for voice and text messaging date to 1990 and have never been overhauled.
