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back to article Psst.. Know how to hack a mobe by radio wave? There's $70k+ in it for you

A second Mobile Pwn2Own hacking competition, in which experts discover and exploit security flaws in handhelds for prizes, will take place at the PacSec 2013 conference in Japan in November. For many years, the original Pwn2Own contest has been held at the CanSecWest get-together in Vancouver every March. Like its older …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    There's an awful lot more than that in it, on offer from far shadier organisations, of course.

    Anon, cos.

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  2. Steve Knox
    Paris Hilton

    Here. You've proven this is broken.

    The first to succeed in each category wins that category's prize as well as the kit they successfully hacked.

    So as a reward, they're given something they themselves have proven to be insecure...

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    1. William Towle
      Reply Icon

      Re: Here. You've proven this is broken.

      > So as a reward, they're given something they themselves have proven to be insecure

      Quite, but then if I were inclined to enter then I'd probably appreciate a spare/new-and-interesting device for experimental purposes - plus the quality of advice on what to avoid* as a replacement for the old kit (or what to shield, if keeping it) would be unparalleled ;)

      * sadly not on what to buy, as the closing paragraphs convey :/

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  3. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

    Google wins

    Has anyone checked what the mobile Chrome does? Google has your bookmarks, your downloads, your history, thumbnails of pages you've visited, your calendar, your contacts, your search history, permission to take pictures, permission to record audio, a live stream of you typing into the URL bar, your location, and it even has an "optimization" that will route all HTTP traffic through Google. Most of this is enabled by the phone's factory configuration wizard.

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    1. Charles 9
      Reply Icon

      Re: Google wins

      Too bad I don't use mobile Chrome. I tend to stick with Opera Classic. It's a bit clunky these days, but it doesn't crash a lot the way the Webkit-based Opera does.

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    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Google wins

      By 'factory configuration' am I correct in assuming this problem is limited to versions of android ?

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  4. Christian Berger

    There are ways to attack mobiles via radio

    For quite some time Nokia "feature phones" used to crash when they got strangely formed SMS or cell broadcasts. Now of course software quality is much better than it used to be in the 1990s, however GSM stacks running on the baseband chips are still that old.

    Furthermore there have been attacks on the SIM cards which even work through SMS.

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