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Sunday, February 27, 2005

A Cure For Cloning


Subash Menon, the 37-year-old President and CEO of Subex Systems is thrilled at the coverage mobile phone cloning has been getting. That's because his company sells Ranger, a fraud prevention software (companies such as Agilent and Ushacomm do too, but Subex is a leader in the business). Indian telcos, claims Menon, lose between 8 per cent and 10 per cent of their revenues to fraud and his software can prevent that. How? By identifying whether multiple calls are emanating from the same phone at the same point in time (the technical term for this is call collision event). And by identifying whether the same phone has made one call from Delhi at 8.12 a.m. and another from Bangalore at 8.16 a.m. (geographically infeasible event). The solution still involves a new phone or a new SIM, or both. Still, that's better than knowing there's someone out there with your phone's twin.

Cellphone Cloning

Recent reports of people cloning both GSM and CDMA phones with the objective of getting legit subscribers to foot airtime bills for illegitimate clones should not surprise anyone. After all, if India is a power to reckon with in the cloning business, isn't it logical that it should have expertise in the cellphone cloning one too? For the benefit of the interested, here's a set of FAQs.

What is the objective of cloning mobile phones?

Getting someone else to pay for your usage or, even more insidious, cloaking activities such as extortion, even terrorism.

Can both GSM and CDMA phones be cloned?

Yes.

How are phones cloned?

With GSM phones that require a SIM (subscriber identity module) card, one can buy a SIM-card cloning device for as little as $100 (Rs 4,400). Pop in the genuine SIM card and a blank and out comes a perfect replica. In case the criminals do not wish to go through the process of acquiring a SIM card, they can literally scan the airwaves for signals. Every time one makes a call from a GSM phone, the phone transmits the phone number assigned to it, the SIM card mobile identification number (min) and its (the phone's) own electronic serial number (ESN); both numbers are also referred to as unique identification number (UIN). Older analogue phones do not encrypt this data and anyone with a $250 (Rs 11,000) scanner can pick it up and transfer the data to a blank SIM card.

With CDMA phones that do not use SIM cards, cloning requires stealing and plugging in the phone to a device that is available fairly freely (starts at $350, Rs 15,400) and copying its ESN and min to another phone, maybe 5,000 miles away. Scanning the airwaves works too.