Mobile cloning - what is it?

Blitzkrieger

I've gotten three "wrong numbers" on my mobile today so my paranoia kicks in and tells me something's up. Immediatly I think Ollie, Chester and "Jayo" have cloned my phone, called a few friends and their friends have called back looking for them.

The thing is - I know nothing about mobile phone cloning so I have no idea how likely, or how common, it is. Anybody had it happen to them?

not much help : http://www.ericsson.com/wireless/products/mobsys/d_amps/subpages/dissues/subpages/difraud.shtml

this is better : http://www.dailyegyptian.com/spring96/041096/phones.html but a bit out of date

A federal offence with a 10 year jail sentence in the US apparantly

Giblet

The f*ckers can get the information about your sim (like serial code and such) and make a replica of it
usually done on bill fones and there are lots of cases of it
but i dont know how common it is know
i'd thought they'd be rid of it with GSM

chernobyl

Cloning is not hard if you can get the phone you wanna target.

Basically you phone has a 6 digit alpha/numa ID number that ties your phone to your phone number, so that when you phone boots up and access the GSM network it sez to Eircell/Digiphone "666999" is here or even "AAA666" is on.

If some one can get hold of this they can send calls via you number and billing you.

To get it you can use a Data cable and some hax0rs toolz or you can actually get hold of software that can dail from your pc straight into you phone, and if you have the skillz, then hack the code.

Blade

Blitzkrieger: Relax, the chances of your phone having been cloned is the same as winning the lotto. If you accept my educated guess and not let people who know nothing about hacking and cloning chips bother you, you'll take it that the chances are that Jayo gave your number out by mistake (or perhaps even on purpose to avoid someone) and his friends are ringing you one after the other not believing that they could possibly have the wrong number for Jayo! And yes it does happen even to me a fair bit. Those URL's u pasted are nothing to worry about, the Ericsson one is just them boasting about their security (which incidently is pretty impressive in all their products) and the other one is reffering to the old analog phones which were a peice of P*ss to clone, note the date '96, besides I can tell from the article their talking about analog as having a scanner for GSM is no use (to the average JAFFA) as the data is encrypted.

chernobyl: Cloning is by no means impossible but certainly isn't as easy as your making out! Where you got the idea of a six digit code being GSM's security is beyond me! To clone someone elses SIM or to Listen to their conversations or Receive their TXT messages requires you to firstly grab their encrypted key by either of two means, 1) using a scanner and a laptop to grab 20 seconds of continous encrypted conversation by your victim or 2) to actually have their SIM in your possesion so that you can dump their encrypted key out of it. Then you have to unencrypt their key using the GSM algo hack (which was released a few years ago) to create a 64 gigabyte table on your PC before extracting their key!!!