Sunday 13 January 2008

Security Alert


We heard SPDC is secretly negotiating with Chinese and Thai phone companies to trace the signals of phones inside Burma. They are giving them lucrative contracts in return for providing SPDC the location of the signals. Anybody using the phones originated by Thai or Chinese phone companies should be careful.

Use only when necessary and use the phone only 1-2 minutes ( I do not know the exact time SPDC needs to trace a call). They are also trying hack gmail accounts. So, change your password frequently.

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ဖုန္းကို အခ်ိန္တုိေျပာပါ။ဖုန္းသုံးေနတဲ့အခ်ိန္မွာပဲ ဘက္ထရီတပ္သုံးပါ။ ျပီးရင္ ဘက္ထရီတုံးကို ခ်က္ျခင္း ျဖဳတ္ပစ္လုိက္ပါ။တယ္လီဖုန္းတုိင္းဟာ ငါးစကၠန္႔မွာတၾကိမ္က် သူဘယ္မွာရိွေနတယ္ဆုိတာကို ျဂိဳလ္တုကေနတဆင့္ ဖုန္းcompanyကို သတင္းပို႔ပါတယ္။ Suggestion from - Mait.

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2 comments :

Unknown said...

ဖုန္းကို အခ်ိန္တုိေျပာပါ။
ဖုန္းသုံးေနတဲ့အခ်ိန္မွာပဲ ဘက္ထရီတပ္သုံးပါ။ ျပီးရင္ ဘက္ထရီတုံးကို ခ်က္ျခင္း ျဖဳတ္ပစ္လုိက္ပါ။
တယ္လီဖုန္းတုိင္းဟာ ငါးစကၠန္႔မွာတၾကိမ္က် သူဘယ္မွာရိွေနတယ္ဆုိတာကို ျဂိဳလ္တုကေနတဆင့္ ဖုန္းcompanyကို သတင္းပို႔ပါတယ္။

Burma Image said...

It is possible to determine only roughly the point of origin of a wireless phone. In the city with more transmission stations, the accuracy could be about 150-500 feet. But out of the city and urban area, it is within about 5 to 10 miles from the station. But the cost to deploy this whole thing is expensive and technically complicated. I guess the whole system upgrades would cost Burmese government more or less $200 millions.
There are a few options they can do. One option involves few changes in the networks and cost less but require customers to replace their handsets with cellphones linked to the Global Positioning System (GPS). But it is costly to the user. Most latest US phones now have GPS build in and there is option to turn ON/OFF by the users or by the station.
The other approach would require the customers to install new software in their phones. It has greater accuracy but only can install to phones with based on Palm, Symbian or Windows Mobile operating systems. These are used in business and multi-media phones. This option and GPS phones are unlikly to be used by the government. So they could go to network upgrades.
The location is determined by computing algorithms using the signal's angle of arrival and the time it took to travel to the base stations. So you can get information returned about nearby restaurants or driving directions. I don’t know Burma has GPS mapping and POIs already developed ( point of interests which tell restaurants, hotel, school, Mall, Gas stations etc. ). Unless these are done, the tracking will be far from perfect.

There is a technology from which the station can find out by asking the phone 'where are you at' and the phone replies back and ships the latitude and longitude. It is called pinging.
The phones with a GPS chip that can send a signal to multiple towers in order to pinpoint the location. So the phone must be ON in order to locate the user. If it is OFF, they can not locate where about of the phone. But still, there are some phones with hidden battery that can send signal without main battery ON. GPS phones need clear sky to get clear signals. So, the raining seasons will be advantage to the people but with noise in the talks.

Other technology that remotely activating and using the cellphone’s microphone it can eavesdrop on nearby conversations. The technique is called a roving bug. It is undetectable and without a beep or a sound. But the range will be around 2-10 feets. Find out your handset has that feature before using and test your mic’s ranges.

My suggestion would be – use regular cellphones or old or foreign phone without GPS, turn off while not in use. Make sure you know the phone features and read the manual. Don’t use real names of both party. Develop more code-words that only you people understand each other. Don’t use it long and leave or go as you talk. While in the meetings, leave the phones to trusted people nearby who are not in the meeting so that they can be both watch out the situation from away and also as personal assistants. If no one is available as PA, then leave the phone to nearby table about 15 feet with low setting on mic. Never leave a message on the network which can be easily read by the system unless that is very urgent or trick/mis-inform the spy. Never asnwer the phone if the other party is not known to you. If you get constant and interval ringing which you don’t know who, you better run.