GSM/GPS Tracking Device Found On Activist's Car At Circumvention Tech Festival

vivaoporto writes A GSM/GPS tracking device was found this March 4 on an activist's car attending the Circumvention Tech Festival in Valencia, Spain, a festival that proposes to gather "the community fighting censorship and surveillance for a week of conferences, workshops, hackathons, and social gatherings, featuring many of the Internet Freedom community's flagship events." They are now asking for the internet tech community for help in order to identify the device. Below verbatim is the plea for help published on the Tor Project website. The fine article also contains pictures of the device.

"On March 4th, 2015, we found a tracking device inside of the wheel well of a car belonging to an attendee of the Circumvention Tech Festival in Valencia, Spain. This was reported in the local media.

If you have information about this device — please send information to jacob at appelbaum dot net using gpg.

The device was magnetically mounted inside of the left wheel well of the car. The battery is attached by cable to the tracking device. The battery was magnetically mounted to the frame of the car. The tracking device was similarly magnetically mounted. The device itself has an external magnetically mounted GPS antenna. It has a very simple free hanging GSM antenna. The device included a Movistar SIM card for GSM network access. The entire device was wrapped in black tape."

Comments

Serial Port anywhere?

[PPH]

There are ways to poke around inside one of these if you can inject commands and read from the GPRS modem port. Many chipsets implement at extended AT command set. There are registers with IP addresses of the target server for the data sent.

Re:Have some fun

[sumdumass]

Or purchase a burner phone, call it from the devicevwith the sim and record the number on the caller ID. From there you can track down who owns the number.

Of course it probably sends GPS coordinates via sms. You could attempt to study the format and send bogus location reports like saying it is at the center of the fukishima reactor, the rim of some volcano, or in the middle of the ocean.

Just hope it is not a rental car and the car company starts charging you credit card for excess mileage or out of boundry insurance coverages.

Re:How did they notice that?

[TWX]

You are completely incorrect. There are LOADS of places that you could stick this thing. There are even places that you could stick this thing where you could power it from the car's electrical system, or use the car's electrical system to charge the battery when the ignition is on.

It's not all that difficult to open a hood. Sometimes you can stick your hand up from below the bumper cover, in between the radiator core support and the grille, and reach the mechanism. Other times you may need a tool, but it's easier to open a hood than it is to open a door.

Do you know where your antenna mechanism sits? There's a bit of a compartment between the inner fender liner, the outer fender, and the firewall. On some cars it can be accessed when the front door is open.

Some cars have plastic inner fender liners between the metal fender liner and the wheel, and often those are almost toolless to remove and install.

Most cars have a metallic inner bumper behind a layer of plastic or styrofoam that's hidden behind the bumper cover. On many cars one could reach that area from below even easier than reaching for the hood latch, and with little more than an AC condenser coil and some lights there's no reason for a mechanic to go poking in there, so a tracker would probably go unnoticed for some time if placed there.

Lastly, if they'd used a more automotive-looking project case they could have just attached it right next to the PCM under the hood, even tapping into a 12V wire to power it.

This was placed where it was placed because someone was in an awful hurry. It was probably a busy public place, and they probably couldn't use cover-of-darkness, so it was either in a well-lit area at night or during the day. I don't expect that whoever did this had much of a budget. No project case, not even heatshrink wrapping to make it look like it belongs, just some amateurish use of black duct tape that would stand out as not belonging to even casual people. Plus the whole poor placement aspect should mean that they weren't especially well trained to do this either.

Re:Garbage

[Z00L00K]

Not every government agency spends megabucks on top equipment when the off the shelf stuff is sufficient.

If you want to track someone and want plausible deniability then it's a lot better to use cheap off the shelf stuff and wrap it in tape. It's no big deal to defend that you lost a $100 device that anyone can buy, it's just written off as operational cost.