I have a #Pixel 10 Pro XL phone, which may be the first phone to give warnings when the phone connects to a rogue cellphone tower or IMSI catcher. The OS cannot block it; it can only tell you that someone read information, and it presents an alert. It says,
“Your data may be at risk. Device ID accessed. At 6:57 PM a nearby network recorded your device’s unique ID (IMSI or IMEI) while using your T-Mobile SIM. This means that your location, activity, or identity has been logged.”
I didn’t ever get an alert before walking through the building, but this time, during a 30-minute walk through the building, I got about 8 alerts, ranging between 1 and 3 minutes apart.
Using this information from repeated connections, someone can follow my movements and location; they can identify it’s me because the IMSI number is unique to my phone, so it can be an indication that someone was collecting all the cellphone information in the area, most likely law enforcement.
It can also mean that I was connecting to a rogue cell phone tower, not just an IMSI catcher, and it was an attempted Stingray attack, likely also law enforcement. If successful, they can try to see and hear what I’m doing on my phone, as my phone won’t know that it’s a fake cellphone tower.
Be aware that a rogue tower will try to negotiate your phone’s connection down to a 2G connection, which is unencrypted, providing them with access to everything that you are doing and saying. Please go into your phone’s settings and disable 2G!!
It’s been believed for some time that this technology has been used by law enforcement secretly and consistently. This is creepy and unnerving.
Turning off the phone, by the way, doesn’t stop an IMSI catcher. Your phone still responds. You need to keep the phone in a Faraday bag if you’re really concerned.
It’s a good thing that phones are now starting to inform people that they are being watched and that people will begin to see how much of an issue this is. You can assume that your local law enforcement knows where you are all the time.
If you switch off 2G, bear in mind that it might be your only option to send emergency calls when otherwise out of signal. Remembering how to switch it back on (or even that you’d switched it off) might not be feasible when you need it!
edit: phone typos
According to the documentation, turning off 2G will not block emergency calls. But, yeah, having said this, definitely, it’s best to remember how to switch it back on, just in case.
Can confirm. The Setting on my Pixel 7 says “Emergency calling is always allowed”
I’m illiterate to these things sort of… So don’t harangue me for this but doesn’t that imply that the connection is always on wether you disabled it or not? Would not outgoing imply incoming as well?
Just curious, again, I have no idea.
As I understand your phone will ignore 2G requests unless it’s an emergency call. Now, you mentioned these suspicious towers will try to downgrade to 2G, which should also be ignored.
US carriers have supposedly decommissioned 2G completely as of February of this year according to Google:
2G is shutdown for consumers, it still exists for commercial systems that use it for data reporting (thing gas lines, remote monitoring systems, etc).
Now I don’t know what that means for our phones, or which towers still have it. I suspect any consumer phone will simply never be able to connect via 2G,but the tower would still see the phone on 2G.
A few years ago someone I knew at T-Mobile said they could no longer get replacement parts for 2G equipment. If it’s still up and running I wonder how it’s being maintained? Or maybe he was misinformed.
That’s hilarious. No major facilities-based mobile network provider in the US has used physical 2G hardware for many years.
Everything was converted to software-defined remote radio heads long ago. The RRHs get mounted up in the air directly behind the antenna element arrays. The same RRHs that power LTE RANs can do GSM just fine.
GSM is computationally and spectrally an afterthought. They literally shove it into the guard bands at the far edges of the PCS LTE carrier.