$7 Cell Phone Sniffer

Thanks to The Verge for this-  just one more weird thing you can do with the omnipresent tracking system that is cellphone infrastructure.

How to make a $7 cellphone sniffer

Please don’t use it for anything creepy

by Russell Brandom@russellbrandom  30.07.2017, 2:00pm EDT

Tracking cellphone signals is much, much easier than you think.

This demo from Danish IT pro Keld Normal uses a $7 USB device to snoop in on cell signals, essentially sniffing out any cellphones connected to a tower nearby.

There’s a lot of Ubuntu and Python stuff going on under the hood, but it’s not as complicated as it looks. The USB doohickey is basically an antenna, picking up signals as they pass between phones and cell towers. This won’t get everything, but it’ll get more data the closer you are to a tower (here’s a good database), and the programs mentioned in the video are pretty good at sorting through the incoming data.

The end result is a database of every phone that connected in the area, along with the unique phone ID, called an IMSI (International Mobile Subscriber Identity) number.

To be clear, this isn’t quite as powerful as the Stingrays police use, but it also won’t get you in quite as much trouble. Those devices are actively sending out signals to nearby phones, masquerading as cell towers. That lets you get more data (along with more privacy concerns), but it also disrupts cell traffic and could get you in trouble with the FCC.
READ MORE > The Verge DIY Cellphone Sniffer Catcher