Category: Security Insights
Why Calls and SMS Aren’t Private: SS7, Explained
Most people assume that a phone call and a text message are reasonably private, protected by the phone company if nothing else. They’re not, and the reason is a piece of plumbing from the 1970s called SS7. Understanding it explains why security professionals treat ordinary calls and texts as open channels, and why your bank’s
Building a Faraday Setup That Actually Works
A Faraday bag is the closest thing to a real off switch for a phone’s radios. Wrap a device in the right material and seal it properly, and nothing gets in or out: no cellular, no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth, no GPS reception. That’s the appeal. The problem is that a lot of homemade Faraday setups,
Secure Phone Maintenance: What Not to Do
Most advice about a secure phone tells you what to set up. Less of it tells you how to avoid quietly dismantling that setup over the following months. A hardened phone isn’t a one-time achievement, it’s a state you can erode one convenient decision at a time. Here are the habits that undo the protection
Buying a Phone Privately, Legally
There’s a legitimate, legal version of buying a phone with less of a data trail, and there’s an illegal version that involves fraud and fake identities. This is about the first one. You can reduce how much unnecessary personal information gets attached to a new device and its service without breaking any laws, and for
Secure-Phone Marketing Claims, Fact-Checked
The secure-phone market runs on bold claims, and most buyers have no way to test them. The marketing is designed that way. But almost all of the claims fall into a handful of recurring categories, and once you know how each one holds up against technical reality, you can evaluate any product’s pitch in minutes.
Carrier Cooperation: What Your Phone Company Actually Shares
Your phone company knows an extraordinary amount about you, and a lot of people assume it keeps that to itself. It doesn’t, exactly. Carriers operate inside a legal framework that obligates them to retain certain data and to hand it over under the right kind of request, and they’re built from the ground up to
The $500 Mobile Security Lab
The best way to understand mobile security is to see it with your own eyes, and you don’t need a corporate budget to do that. For a few hundred dollars, you can assemble a modest home lab that lets you observe how phones actually behave, what they leak, and how hardening changes things. The point
What Your Phone Actually Broadcasts (RF 101)
Your phone is a radio. Several radios, actually, and most of them are talking far more than you realize, even when the screen is dark and you’re not using it. None of this is sinister by itself, it’s how the device works, but each radio is a different way of being noticed. Here’s a plain-English
IMEI and the Law: Where Changing It Is a Crime
We’ve said repeatedly on this blog that changing your IMEI is a bad idea, and most of that advice has focused on the fact that it doesn’t technically work the way the marketing claims. There’s a second reason that deserves its own discussion: in much of the world, deliberately altering an IMEI is a criminal
Building a Secure Comms Setup for a Small Team
Securing your own phone is one thing. Securing how a small team communicates is a different problem, because the weakest member sets the security of the whole group. A team is only as private as its least careful person, and good individual habits don’t automatically add up to a secure team. Here’s how a small
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