How attackers and jealous partners can spy (spy app for android) on you, and why you should leave a bag of chips to movie heroes. In the new Terminator, Sarah Connor put her phone in a bag of chips so that enemies could not track her movements. Our recent experiment showed that the method (with some reservations) is quite workable: a couple of foil packets successfully jams radio signals - from cellular base stations, satellites (for example, GPS) and wireless networks like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. But how often do real intruders spy on people through all these networks? Let's try to figure it out.
Surveillance via radio signals: GSM, GPS, Wi-Fi
Sarah Connor was primarily concerned about the signal of the satellite positioning system - GPS. At first glance, it is logical, because it is the satellites that allow you to determine the exact location of the device. However, in reality, not everything is so simple.
Is it possible to follow you via GPS
To determine its location, the phone itself does not transmit any information to the satellite. In general. The system works only in one direction: the phone receives a signal from several satellites, analyzes how long this signal has spent on the road, and thus calculates its coordinates.
So it's impossible to track someone with GPS alone. After all, you need to somehow send an "encryption to the center" with coordinates from the phone, and the GPS standard does not provide such an opportunity.
Surveillance through mobile networks
But with the towers of the cellular network, unlike GPS satellites, communication takes place in both directions. And although determining your location is not the main task of cellular communication, in this matter it can also help. Roughly speaking, knowing which tower currently serves the phone, you can find out where it is. However, it is very difficult to access this data.
Recently, researchers have discovered a rather interesting way to find out information about the tower closest to the phone – through an intricate vulnerability of the SIM card, which can be used using a regular computer and a USB modem. However, this method requires special knowledge in the field of cellular communications, so it is used only in expensive targeted attacks.
In addition, geolocation with the help of cell towers is not very accurate: it allows you to determine not the exact coordinates, but only the site on which you are located. And if in the city this area is relatively small (your location can be found out with an accuracy of a couple of hundred meters), then in rural areas, where there are fewer cell towers, the distance between them can be calculated in kilometers - and the error in determining the location will also be huge.
Surveillance over Wi-Fi
You can also track your movements using Wi-Fi – when you log in to an open network, it receives both device data and some information about you. In addition, smartphones send information about themselves to the air in search of available networks, and you can track them even if you did not connect to anything.
The inconvenience is that you can spy on your movements via Wi-Fi only while you are near the access points controlled by the tracking access point. Therefore, this method, although practiced, is not for surveillance of specific people, but rather for general observation of the behavior of people in some limited territory. For example, this is done in some shopping centers in order to select individual advertising offers based on data on visits to certain stores.
How You Can Actually Be Watched: OS and Apps
It turns out that it's simply impossible to follow via GPS, it's too inconvenient via Wi-Fi, and it's expensive and difficult to follow through a cellular network. However, even if you are not the head of an international corporation or an investigative journalist, this does not mean that no one, except for the ubiquitous advertisers, is watching and is not going to follow you at all. For example, your GPS coordinates, personal correspondence and other data may well be of interest to a suspicious boss or jealous partner. This is how these people are. they can actually keep an eye on you.
Hack Apple or Google account
By default, your data is collected by iOS and Android. They also store them in your Apple or Google account. If it is hacked, then everything that the system diligently collected will fall into the hands of the attacker. So we recommend that you properly protect your accounts. At a minimum, set a long unique password and enable two-factor authentication. And at the same time, you can configure what information about you is stored in these accounts – for example, the storage of location history can be safely disabled.
View metadata, geotagging, and check-ins
Unfortunately, sometimes the users themselves make it much easier to spy on themselves. For example, they publish photos in social networks with metadata - information about the picture sewn into the file: where and when it was taken, on which camera, and so on. Some resources delete this information when you upload a photo, but not all. If you are not lucky, anyone can see the history of the picture.
Also, your checks and manually placed geotags will play into the hands of intruders. If you want to prevent others from watching your movements, it is better to abandon all this.
Install spyware – spyware on your smartphone
There are many applications whose main task is to collect and transmit information from your device to their owners. With their help, you can track not only your movements, but also messages, calls and much more – the specific set of data that spyware can steal can vary.
Malware penetrates the smartphone under the guise of harmless applications or exploits vulnerabilities in the system. They work in the background and do everything not to attract attention to themselves. Therefore, usually the victim is not even aware that something is wrong with his mobile phone.
Source: https://hackarizona.org/