The Security Mentor

Have you ever had a paranoid mood where you stopped to think what a great bugging device your cell phone would make?

It has a microphone, it's always with you, it knows where you are if it's a recent model, and it's regularly talking to the base station in between calls so that people who call you get their calls sent to the right base station. If it's a new phone it may have a GPS chip so it knows your exact position.

Political dissidents in some countries worry about cell phones that are programmed to act as bugs even when they're supposedly switched off. These dissidents will ask visitors to pull the batteries out of their cell phones before any sensitive conversation.

That may sound paranoid, but it may also not be enough.

One experimenter found that he could pull the battery during a phone call and the phone would keep going for ten or fifteen seconds. That's with the power-hungry radio transmitter going. It could last much longer if all it were doing was recording audio.

Fortunately, unlike malicious software, this isn't something normal people need to worry about.