Wireless Devices Vulnerable to Tampering

March 2, 2005 — -- It's Sunday night at the Oscars, and the place is crawling with security people. A police helicopter circles overhead. Steven Spielberg, Paris Hilton and Prince get into limousines, but one can barely see them from behind all the barriers.

To John Hering, though, the place is like a sieve.

"Most people are worried about physical security," he said. But electronic security is another matter -- Hering's, actually. "As every single celebrity, VIP and executive drives by us, we're going to be able to scan their mobile phones."

Hering and three college classmates have started a software security firm called Flexilis Inc. They couldn't care less about computer software, though; they say the next wave for hackers and virus creators is the wireless phone.

That is why the Flexilis team turned out on Oscar night, carrying a laptop with a small antenna hidden in a backpack. They wanted to see how many vulnerable cell phones they could detect.

"Cell phones are becoming digital wallets," he said. "Ten years ago, no one kept the kind of vital information that they do today on them."

Computer security giants such as IBM have been putting out repeated warnings about the rise of threats to mobile devices. But the issue finally got some attention this winter because of socialite-turned-reality-TV-star Paris Hilton.

Strictly speaking, it was not her cell phone -- a T-Mobile Sidekick II -- that was hacked. Someone did, however, get their hands on data sent from her Sidekick to a T-Mobile server, and pretty soon the private numbers of all her Hollywood friends were all over the Web.

One can chuckle at Hilton's misfortune, but Hering says that, in a roundabout way, she did the world a favor. Her case served warning that a cell phone is less than safe.

"The device is in range," said Hering from the roof of Flexilis' office building in Los Angeles. He pointed a shotgun-shaped antenna at the street below.

Interception of cell-phone signals is illegal, but Hering and his co-workers offered us a demonstration of how easy it is to tap into the Bluetooth connection many high-end devices have. (Bluetooth is a technology that allows short-range signals to travel between, for instance, a cell phone and a wireless headset.)