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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Friday, July 10, 2009

What’s bugging the rich and famous

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A story running in the Guardian newspaper in the UK revolves around large number of politicians, prominent people and celebrities who have had their phones “tapped” or “bugged” by reporters on another British paper, the News of the World.
You might think from the headline that some miscreant has spent a lot of money on a GSM analyser and is scanning the airwaves with professional signal decode kit to trace the call of the rich and famous. Nothing so sophisticated, it seems. Apparently, many of these so-called intercepts involve nothing more than calling the victim’s remote voicemail access and gaining fraudulent access.
How? It seems that the victims in question are too busy, or too stupid, to have bothered to change the access code from the one that their service provider gave them – so trying “1234” or “0000” has a good chance of success for the unscrupulous tabloid snooper.
If that is the source of this story, I have little sympathy for the “victims”. If, on the other hand, there really is someone out there in tabloid journalism with the equipment to capture off-air GSM traffic and the expertise to extract the call stream that they want… then, I’m officially impressed.

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