About 25 percent of mobile phones currently in use may be vulnerable because they rely on 1970s-era Data Encryption Standard security, according to Security Research Labs. Out of 1,000 SIM cards it tested over two years, 250 used DES instead of more advanced approaches such as triple DES or the Advanced Encryption Standard, the lab said.
About 7 billion SIM cards are used worldwide, Survey Research estimated, so as many as 1.75 billion of them could conceivably be employing DES security, putting owners of phones with those SIM cards at risk.
This may well be the case however one need not be too concerned about this. Unless the phone with the sim on board has been lost or other wise dispossessed even for a short time AND it has fallen into wrong hands targeted attack is unlikely. Yes something like Nigerian scam can still happen and the if the hacker is capable and patient enough of sifting through jillions of bytes of data in the hopes of finding something worthwhile its a different story!
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SIM Card Flaw Could Wreak Havoc on Millions of Phones
Posted by: Richard Adhikari July 22, 2013 03:07 PMAbout 25 percent of mobile phones currently in use may be vulnerable because they rely on 1970s-era Data Encryption Standard security, according to Security Research Labs. Out of 1,000 SIM cards it tested over two years, 250 used DES instead of more advanced approaches such as triple DES or the Advanced Encryption Standard, the lab said.
About 7 billion SIM cards are used worldwide, Survey Research estimated, so as many as 1.75 billion of them could conceivably be employing DES security, putting owners of phones with those SIM cards at risk.