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Investigators Replicate Nokia 1100 Banking Hack
Ian Lamont writes "Investigators have duplicated an online banking hack using a 2003-era Nokia mobile phone. Authorities had been aware for some time that European gangs were interested in buying the phone, and were finally able to confirm why: It can be used to access victims' bank accounts using "special software written by hackers." The hack apparently works by letting criminals reprogram the phones to use someone else's phone number and receive their SMS messages, including mTANs (mobile transaction authentication numbers) from European banks. However, the only phones that work are 1100 handsets (pictures) made in a certain factory. Nokia had claimed last month it had no idea why criminals were paying thousands of euros to buy the old handsets."
It probably isn't so much just the ROM, but also the code on the phone itself, and the amount of available room in the memory to work with. The hackers probably developed their code specifically for that phone, and are counting on memory addresses being in a particular place, and all sorts of other variables that have to be considered when writing assembly code for a specific piece of hardware.
Back in the day, everyone wanted an Oki 900 because it could store between 5 and 99 ESN/MIN pairs AND swap them on the fly. In theory, you could just use G2 and reprogram a Motorola flip phone, but that required a laptop and a loader phone. So sure, you could do the same with with a Motorola, but it was a lot easier to use an Oki. In the end though, the result was the same. You were able to make calls and not pay for them.
In the case of the Nokia phone, whoever developed the hack developed it for the Nokia 1100. They probably spent a lot of time reverse engineering/disassembling the original EEPROM and a lot of time hacking the code together to make it work.
Trying to outsell?
Nokia's one billionth phone sold was a Nokia 1100 purchased in Nigeria.
(http://www.engadget.com/2005/09/21/nokia-crosses-one-billion-mark/)
Although something tells me that Nigeria isn't neccessarily most prominent market for apple, since price of an iphone is equal to one years salary for an average nigerian.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
This article is plain stupid, Nokia 1110 has nothing than other phones in the same Nokia DCT4 family don't have, while DCT4 firmwares can be decrypted, Nokia DCT3 phones(Nokia 3310, etc) are much more well suited for this job, given the fact that already exists an open source(GPL) firmware in C for this devices... And about SIM cloning, YOU CANÂT clone a GSM SIM card in seconds!!!! The most advanced software for clone SIM cards(SimScan - http://users.net.yu/~dejan/) still has to do some brute-force to extract the Ki key, witch is designed to never leave the card, while we can extract IMSI with no problems , to clone a SIM card, you need two values: IMSI and Ki, and without Ki, IMSI is worthless...
Bullshit. Not on any properly run network. Apart from the IMEI (which is written on the back of the phone) and the IMSI (which you can get with a special code from some phones) there's also the Ki. This is a secret which is buried in the SIM card and _never_ sent out to the phone. Without the physical SIM card in your phone you do not have the number.
Now, there have been flaws in this; it has been possible to clone the SIM card because of implementation flaws, but properly made new SIMS should not have most of these. The authentication algorithms used originally were weak and could leak the key, but modern SIMs should be using stronger ones (e.g. AES). However none of these were magically to do with one particular model of a phone.
Something different is going on here. E.g. a security company marketing scam or that the mobile can work as a short range base station and do interception or something else. Definitely not the way that it seems to be explained in the article. And definitely not that the just "changed the IMEI and the IMSI and became the other subscriber"; apart from anything else, you have no need to change the IMEI to do that.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();