Is Someone Spying On Your Cell-Phone Calls?

by Jessica Ramirez, Newsweek Sometime in early 2007, Richard Mislan, an assistant professor of cyberforensics at Purdue University, started getting phone calls and e-mails from people around the world—all looking for help with the same problem. “They thought someone was listening in on their cell-phone calls,” he says. “They wanted to know what they could do to confirm it was happening.”

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Mislan, who has examined thousands of phones at the Purdue Cyber Forensics Lab, politely disregarded some callers as a little paranoid. Others, he thought, had reason to be concerned. A decade ago the idea that anyone with little technical skill could turn a cell phone into a snooping device was basically unrealistic. But as the smart-phone market proliferates—it grew 86 percent in the United States alone last year—so do all the ethical kinks that come with it. Among them is a growing sector of perfectly legal smart-phone spyware apps that are peddled as tools for catching a cheating spouse or monitoring the kids when they’re away from home. But what they can effectively do, for as little as $15 or as much as several hundred, is track a person with a precision once relegated to federal authorities. “Not only can you look at a person’s e-mail or listen to their calls, in some cases you can also just turn on the microphone [on a smart phone] and listen to what the person is doing any time you want,” says Chris Wysopal, cofounder and CTO of Veracode, a software-security company. Turning what is essentially cell-phone-bugging software into a business model is not a bad idea, technically speaking. The smart-phone market—largely dominated by the Symbian, Research in Motion, and iPhone operating systems—has 47 million users in the United States and is expected to exceed 1 billion worldwide by 2014, according to Parks Associates, a market-research firm. In most cases, people’s lives are tethered to these handsets. It’s how we e-mail, text, search, and, on occasion, even call someone. And the dependence just continues to grow. Last year consumers paid for and downloaded more than 670 million apps that can turn a phone into everything from a book reader to a compass. Smart-phone users effectively carry a real-time snapshot of what happens in their daily lives. This is what makes the smart phone the perfect way to track someone. More...