Security breach on PinePhone UBports SMS

[User 18618]

I'm inclined to believe that your predicament was entirely the fault of the carrier - I would switch to another, if I were you.

[Athansor]

I'm inclined to believe that your predicament was entirely the fault of the carrier - I would switch to another, if I were you.

I'm on my third carrier, starting to run out of options, lol.

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UPDATE: This gets better and stranger.

about 1.5 hours with Cricket support (much of which was done on my PP, yay!). My account has been reset entirely via their web interface, so if someone has jacked the card, they cannot access the account easily. They also "reset" my SIM card (I have *no* idea what that means, if anything), and after whatever they did, I can now receive texts from them. I still cannot receive texts from individual phones, however.

I am less concerned, as I have sent no critical financial or other information through my PP. My cricket account was the only one through which the phone might have had access, and that's gone.

I still have no idea what the source of the issue is, and the possibility of being SIMjacked is concerning. As much fun as I've been having, I think I'm going to put my PP on the shelf for a few months and see where things stand in the fall or early winter.StWonder if same experience would be had if off developer channel? (dev channel warns it may mess with your experience and is untested). UT Stable seems the best option for weeding out possible carrier/sim problems.

I used to monitor cell towers and map locations after missing many texts on my Android (and to try to improve cell service by detecting/blocking imsi catcher/stingrays- a tower that moves is not a real tower). They are rampant in some parts of USA - mostly cities/protest areas. Mostly running lower g interception. Sometimes they do denial of service downgrade service attacks on all phones in area (each taking up to 10,000 phones at a time) to force them to connect to their man in the middle attack (by causing phones to believe they have better signal). Especially common in cities/protest areas.

This is why I mentioned turning 2g/3g off if possible to attempt to prevent interference.

My area had a lot of these devices hijacking phones indiscriminately, I believe this is what lead me to miss texts on my Android.

Personally I have my Pinephone set to 4G only (have had 0 issues, everything runs great- no delayed txts). Only the most advanced/most well funded adversary would have access to 4G imsi catcher to disrupt service. And no phone has protection from this- pinephone is no more vulnerable than Apple/Android.

It could be completely unrelated. I was just speculating. I really have no idea.

Maybe someone else will chime in.

I always wondered how stingrays work. I live in the backwaters though, so I'm not sure how many I would encounter around here. Although a stingray-detecting app would be cool.

[User 18618]

Some explanatory articles on Stingray for posterity: EFF, ExtremeTech

I wonder if this technique is also employed in the UK? May switch to 4G Only if that's the case.