What does HackerNews think of IMSI-catcher?

A cheap radio hack disrupted Poland's railway system | Aug 2023

I'll do you one better:

For GSM, basic IMSI sniffing: https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher (usable with cheap SDRs)

For LTE, basic IMSI sniffing: https://github.com/JiaoXianjun/LTE-Cell-Scanner (usable with cheap SDRs)

For LTE, full-on sniffing of all unencrypted metadata: https://github.com/SysSec-KAIST/LTESniffer (generally requires fancy SDRs with GPSDO)

Can vouch that the first and second repos definitely worked as of about a year ago, but haven't personally tried since then. I don't have a USRP X310 (yet!) so can't personally speak to the fancy one.

Building a Passive IMSI Catcher | Apr 2019

This is one facet of what my talk is going to be about: https://ccc2019cfp.busyconf.com/activities/5c3a57314808fac10...

I was accepted for a presentation "SigInt for the Masses;Building and Using a Signals Intelligence Platform for Less than $150"

I already have the device built, and so does someone else on the west coast!

My repo is here, which includes 3d printables (that I designed and printed), Bill of Materials, and bash standup scripts from current Raspbian. https://gitlab.com/crankylinuxuser/siginttablet

What does it look like? https://imgur.com/a/rImW7av

With the nrf mousejack / gr-nordic: https://twitter.com/CrankyLinuxUser/status/11188788307463086...

If you look through my scripts, I compile both gr-gsm and gr-lte, along with https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher.git as referenced in the project. The signals I can work with/attack/listen are as follows:

     tx: 100KHz-1.5GHz
     rx: 20MHz-1.7GHz
     duplex: 802.11abgn
     duplex: nRF24LU1 (nearly all non-BT wireless keyboards and mice)

911 call centers down in Washington state | Dec 2018

Expand Context ↕

If the government is in control of the network or can can order / request the network to do so it would be fairly trivial to send a message to anyone connected to a cell tower.

The thing is if the tower is serving a lot of people you could end up sending the message to people not involved so you could use a IMSI catcher (you can even make them out of a TV Tuner turned SDR receiver[0]) to catch IMSI's in a smaller area or use triangulation to narrow down the pool of devices in an area and then use that list to send SMS from the network itself.

The UK did trails of using location based text messages back in 2013 in order to be used for Public emergency alerts [1]

When you can gain access to the network their is no real need to MITM it, but yeah I believe a sting ray type device could also do the same as they act as a tower and trick your phone into connecting to it.

[0] https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/mobile-alerting-t... (link to the info about the trial and the final report)