How Police can Tap, Steal Phone data

You will be amazed by the fact that Police can now Tap & steal your personal data from your smartphone/ feature-phone alike. This data is extremely valuable, contains not just the call records, Text but also your location history and what not.

Michigan police was already found to do that last month, but if sources are to be trusted, they are going nationwide in US and soon in several other countries. The device used is the CelleBrite UFED, which is able to copy most of the data on over 2500 different mobile devices. It does all that in under 2 minutes. UFED brochure claims:

The UFED system extracts vital information from 95% of all cellular phones on the market today, including smartphones and PDA devices (Palm OS, Microsoft, Blackberry, Symbian, iPhone, and Google Android). Simple to use even in the field with no PC required, the UFED can easily store hundreds of phonebooks and content items onto an SD card or USB flash drive.

And technical description:

The UFED hardware with Physical Extraction module, used to create Physical and/or Logical dumps from mobile devices, which can then be saved to a USB disk drive, SD memory card, or directly to your PC.ƒ The UFED Physical Analyzer (PA) PC application, which provides an in-depth physical memory analysis of the extracted mobile phone data (phonebook contents, SMS messages, call logs, image files, video files, audio files, and more) The Physical Analyzer also serves to generate comprehensive and verified evidence reports of relevant data extracted and analyzed from the mobile device.

The UFED Physical Analyzer software allows the investigator to perform in-depth analysis of the extracted data
and generate reports. The UFED PA application provides the following key features:

• ƒ Analysis of the hex dump with a layered view of memory content
• Provides a detailed view of the hex dump
• Reconstructs the phone file system
• Decodes contact lists, SMS messages, call logs, phone information (IMSI, ICCID, user codes) and more
• Provides a view of data files – images, videos, etc.
• Provides access to both current and deleted data
• Retrieves phone passwords
• Simple viewing and user friendly browsing of information

ƒ Powerful search tools

• Instantly search for project content
• Search the hex dump or file system

Search by various parameters such as strings, bytes, numbers, dates

• Use GREP search (regular expressions) to look for specific data strings
• Bookmarking memory locations for indexing of key areas for later review

The ACLU fears that the next time you get stopped for speeding in Michigan, you’ll be handing over your cell phone, and your entire mobile history, to the nice officers. Of course, you have no idea into what all they can grab. Of course, you don’t have an option.

There’s something thats more scary than being able to extract your information — Being able to inject information into the phone like fake call logs, gps logs, text messages, calendar appointments. It would open your call log SQLLite DB (in the case of an iPhone, Android) and write a new entry. e.g. If my intake information says I received the phone at 15:20:00 but there is a write to phonecalls.sql at 16:22:00 User better have a logical explanation.

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