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Your Phone Number Is All a Hacker Needs To Read Texts, Listen To Calls and Track You (theguardian.com)
Samuel Gibbs, reporting for The Guardian: Hackers have again demonstrated that no matter how many security precautions someone takes, all a hacker needs to track their location and snoop on their phone calls and texts is their phone number. The hack, first demonstrated by German security researcher Karsten Nohl in 2014 at a hacker convention in Hamburg, has been shown to still be active by Nohl over a year later for CBS's 60 Minutes. The hack uses the network interchange service called Signalling System No. 7 (SS7), also known as C7 in the UK or CCSS7 in the US, which acts as a broker between mobile phone networks. When calls or text messages are made across networks SS7 handles details such as number translation, SMS transfer, billing and other back-end duties that connect one network or caller to another. By hacking into or otherwise gaining access to the SS7 system, an attacker can track a person's location based on mobile phone mast triangulation, read their sent and received text messages, and log, record and listen into their phone calls, simply by using their phone number as an identifier.Also from the report, "60 Minutes contacted the cellular phone trade association to ask about attacks on the SS7 network. They acknowledged there have been reports of security breaches abroad, but assured us that all U.S. cellphone networks were secure." Update: 04/18 16:51 GMT by M :Reader blottsie writes: U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Cali.) on Monday called for a full congressional investigation into the aforementioned widespread flaw in global phone networks.
...which you can get from a number of websites for a buck...
SS7...wow, that takes me back. I thought it had gone out with the landline. Yeah, SS7 has to know your number, that's kind of the whole point of the system, to be able to set up and tear down the call, and to bill correctly. Out-of-band signalling was the death of the oldschool phone phreak, who depended on being able to send tones down the line to control the call. Good ol' Phrack. And idiotic Phrack writers who didn't know what they were talking about. It's a good thing they didn't have comment sections back then, only a periodic publication. Erik Bloodaxe, Voyager, Sirsyko, and when Mudge wasn't an establishment tool. Netta Gilboa. RBOCs. Dumpster diving behind the phone company's central offices. Good times.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Mobile networks use two different SS7 networks, one for TCAP communication which includes SMS but not voice and one for ISUP which includes no voice and no SMS (it is a Signalling System). Voice has moved over to SIP from ISUP and the majority of all voice calls never leave the Mobile Switching Center(MSC) and thus there is nothing to tap. Additionally the Mobile Directory Number is not the key used for communication, the IMSI is.
Basically, if you know a Mobile Directory Number and you could insert yourself into the SS7 network you could find out where the phone is but only the city and state, assuming the city was big enough, you only get the MSC. You could also send SMS messages to the phone but you can do that already can't you?
And yeah, they don't even need your phone number, if you get access to the user's local network, figuring their phone number out is a breeze.