Hi all,

Right away, I'm not looking for ways to intercept sms/text or calls. But my questions does have something to do with it. To make long story short, a friend on mine who's not very tech savvy, asked me to look into ways to tell if his Iphone sms and/or calls being intercepted. If it was a PC I wouldn't have any problems as I would to a sweep and monitor network activities and such, but when it comes to iphone I'm really at the loss.

So my question is, are there any tools to see if his SIM card was duplicated somehow (the only way I'm thinking it could have happened through blue tooth, maybe, as no one had physical access to his phone)? Which brings me to the question, can the SIM card be duplicated and used in another device to "silently" listen and/or view incoming texts and call logs? If the answer is yes to any of the above, any help as far as where I can purchase proper tools to do diagnostics and prevent this heppening and what is the security situation for the Iphones in regards to intercepting calls/text, would be greatly appreciated.

He has Iphone4, it's not jailbroken.

Thanks in advance.

Voice and text can be intercepted by the service provider and there's no way to detect. Duplicated SIM doesn't work with current SIM version. The risk of being intercepted is more likely from portable rogue BTS or Cell Monitor equipment, (more details can be found on Google), in general mobile users don't realize when they are within the coverage of a rogue BTS. In some rare cases, the guy operating the rogue BTS is careless, makes mistake and blows his cover.

Thanks for the answer.

I didn't know about current SIMs so that's good to know. I did some research and apparently there are some apps that will intercept calls and texts (like omegaspy) but the iphone needs to be jailbroken and the app needs to be installed (though I saw some stuff about shh methods). In any event, my friend does not have a jailbroken phone so that's out the window. Also it seems my fears about SIM were baseless. It's interesting you've mentioned BTS as my friend in question is former military and that's what he thought right away. I guess I'll look into it. As far as provider/government its completely out of question as my friend is also former police officer and recently retired due to injury while on duty (long story and not something to discuss).

Anyways, thanks aneagle in pointing me in some solid direction.

If anyone else has something to add I would appreciate it.

Net

Some follow up question if I may.

I've looked into BTS and it's something that got my attention. Here's my question, since OpenBTS tricks the phone to think it's connected to the network but instead rerouting the call via voip, is there a way to pull logs from Iphone to see if there are changes to the network activity. In other words, is there a log that would show me if the Iphone was connected to a single tower (for example if the phone was laying at home and was not move from that location), or was it rerouted to BTS? Another question (and I'm sorry if its a bit newb) but do towers have some sort of ids that can be identified on the phone's logs? Again, sorry for what might be pretty simple questions, but BTS opened up a slew of info and from what I saw you only need a laptop, linux, and a fairly small box to pretty much completely bypass security by faking authantification (though it seems that phones don't even do that, but simply assume that they are on the proper network). From what I see so far, it's crazy! How come no one talks about it, its a huge security issue.

Thanks for any help.

Yes, each BTS has an ID. There's an app named Signal from Cydia, it marks and records all towers detected by the iPhone on the map, it shows service and adjacent tower info but not compatible yet with iPhone 4s, works fine on iPhone 4. If you take a screen shot of the Signal map at a location you can compare later and see if there's new BTS, network operator doesn't change and move the towers unless they need to fix the coverage due to new buildings. Rogue BTS can't have wide coverage, it can be smaller than a laptop but they always fit it into a laptop because it need some computing, database and a screen. Many things can be done with a rogue BTS, it's mainly used to track a volatile user and record the communication. Per example, a user changes sim too often, it scans the area to get a list of phones, the operator starts to make calls and pretending he gets wrong number, the user's answer will be compared to a voice database for a hit. Rogue BTS can act as relay station for recording, recording is easier at the switches by inserting a conference unit.