After three years of intense research a German cryptographer by the name of Karsten Nohl has reason to believe that your SIM card could now be at risk of being hacked.

Nohl has claimed to have found encryption as well as software flaws that could lead to the tampering of millions of SIM cards. The findings that could open up a means of mobile phone surveillance and fraud are being called “the first hack of its kind in a decade” and are being presented at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas on 31 July.

The findings come after Nohl and his team tested nearly 1,000 SIM cards for possible vulnerabilities by sending a hidden SMS.

According to Forbes:

The two-part flaw, based on an old security standard and badly configured code, could allow hackers to remotely infect a SIM with a virus that sends premium text messages (draining a mobile phone bill), surreptitiously re-direct and record calls, and — with the right combination of bugs — carry out payment system fraud.

It has been reported that the biggest problem for phone users in Africa would be payment fraud, but there is no obvious pattern.

Nohl:

Different shipments of SIM cards either have [the bug] or not. It’s very random.

Th study shows that just under a quarter of all the SIM cards he tested could be hacked and he estimates that an eighth of the world’s SIM cards fall into the same group. Efforts are already being made to stop the bug according to Nohl.

Companies are surprisingly open to the idea of working cooperatively on security topics because the competition is somewhere else. The competition is organized crime, not AT&T versus T-Mobile.

For more on the subject, click here.

[Source: Forbes]