Encrypted calls are protecting you from the ones that don’t want to (or cannot) intercept your phone calls, and does not protect you at all against the ones that can intercept your calls – law enforcement, homeland security and intelligence agencies. Make sense to you? If not, please read below.
Most people think that call encryption is the Holly Grail of secure communications, being also a mainstream when it comes to software development for mobile security. Why is that? Because of 007 movies? Not at all. Because is the only product you can find on nowadays security overcrowded market. From hardware devices to sophisticated software applications, all claim that encrypting your mobile voice calls is the best you can get and there are no other trustworthy solutions. Unfortunately encrypted calls does not offer real security when you are targeted not just by (abusive or not) law enforcement, homeland security or intelligence agencies, but worst, even when you are a target for a skilled hacker.
You don’t have to trust us. Just google for voice call encryption hack and tons of articles are available at a glance.
For those of you that use voice encryption products on mobile phones the last thing you would expect is for it to be easily decrypted and intercepted. You may have shelled out good coin for your application and rely upon it for your intellectual security, but what if that security was not as tight as you had imagined, what if a readily available wiretapping utility attainable by anyone, and a simple Trojan slipped on to your device could compromise all of your calls?
Back in 2010 blogger, hacker and IT security expert Notrax has done just that. For his own safety we will not reveal his name, however, Notrax has discovered that 12 commercially available mobile voice encryption products can be intercepted and compromised using a little ingenuity and creativity as he has carefully detailed on his website.
He tested 15 voice encryption products in total, 12 of them were “worthless”. It’s easy to take the software at face value when it “tells you” that the call is secured. But how does someone actually go about being sure that it is secured? Notrax did some digging and discovered he could break in to almost all of them in under 30 minutes.
Secure means that Notrax did not manage to crack it. It does not mean that someone else would not be able to crack it.
These calls can be tapped by anyone that has basic technical skills or the money to back up such an endeavor. “Statistics show Government agencies on average conduct 50,000 legal wiretaps per year (legal= those where a court order is required), (Let’s not forget Echelon) another 150,000 phones are illegally tapped by private detectives, spouses and boyfriends and girlfriends trying to catch a potential cheater. Another estimate shows up to 100,000 phones are wiretapped by companies and private industry in some form of industrial espionage. It is happening and it is a big business.”