Cell phone wardriving/hacking?

Posted by jackelpdw on Wednesday March 18, 2009 @12:39AM
from the self-post dept.

So this morning at around 2:30am I was driving back home for my lunch break, and was pulling off Augusta's ring road when I ended up behind a blue sedan with Washington(state) plates. It was moving fairly slow considering there was zero traffic and it was 2:30 in the morning. As I inevitably got right behind it, I noticed that there were six identical cell phones tied to the driver's side head rest, one on either side and 4 along the back, all facing outwards. The rack was connected to a wire that ran out of the car to an ipod-sized antenna on the roof. One after the other each cell phone would dial a random number and then hold the call for about 40 seconds before dropping it and going black for a few seconds. Call, hangup, black, call, hangup, black...repeat. It was rather eerie to watch, and the passenger sitting in the back behind the passenger-side seat seemed to look up and back down every once in a while like he was either controlling them or recording what was going on with them. I was behind them for about 6 minutes before I reached my apartment complex and turned off the road. Has anyone ever seen or heard of anything like this? It just seemed extremely weird and I still haven't come up with any sort of explanation for it that doesn't sound whack.

Re:Cell phone wardriving/hacking? by Micand on Wednesday March 18, 2009 @03:52AM (#521352)

That is indeed fascinating. Perhaps it was some sort of phone cloning attempt ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_cloning ), in which cell phone subscribers' accounts are hijacked to make fradulent calls. I know almost nothing of the issue, but I hope someone can offer some more informed commentary.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Cell phone wardriving/hacking? by knieveltech on Wednesday March 18, 2009 @01:16AM (#521240)

Wow, that's fascinating. In the current absence of non-whack explanations, what have you come up with so far?

Re:Cell phone wardriving/hacking? by jackelpdw on Wednesday March 18, 2009 @07:41AM (#521504)

It's been suggested they were doing some sort of ESN sniffer attack to try to clone and steal a cell phone's ESN to make illegal calls. The area they were driving through is filled with apartment complexes with lots of college-age folk in them, so I imagine there were a lot of cell phones active at the time. After that it drifts into espionage sort of things or cyber attacks, but I don't even have an explanation for why or how those would work.