Text Message Hijacking

[jozhua]

Can you tell how much time elapsed between the 2 messages?

 

[choklitcow]

You could be lying like no other and I would still enjoy this thread.

Sorry that it is at your expense, but if a loophole such as this is available it leads to endless possibilities not just with sms.

 

[mchoffa]

Oops, what I said yesterday was wrong (I was looking at the message i forwarded when I said my original came through as well). Only the edited version of the message came through to her at the time I originally sent it...

Verizon tech rep checked the actual network send/receive times and it was only 7 seconds between the time it sent from my phone and received on hers... no way the message could have left my phone, gotten intercepted by someone, who then edited it, and gotten to her phone, in that short amount of time, especially since it was a whole sentence... only possibility if someone didn't physically do it is that one of my apps or her apps has spyware in it that auto inserted text based on keywords, which seems to be very possible considering there is not much of a filter of what apps get in the market.

Still slightly paranoid about sending anything even slightly personal in a text.

 

[TimChgo9]

Spyware sounds plausible, given the time frame of 7 seconds.

There is also the possibility, however remote, that part of someone else's text message wound up mixed up with the one you sent, but, the fact that the sentence that was added was in context, kind of goes against that theory.

 

[Flomaster]

had a similar experience with my Gmail app. the thread was deleted due to scantily clad photos I posted, but my wife had sent me an email with photos of my SON attached I viewed them at work but when I got home I wanted to save the photos and 2 of the ones she sent had been replaced with a scantily clad busty women and that same women preforming some personal business.

I have since wiped my droid clean and changed all my passwords just to be safe.


-=Jason=-

 

[New2u]

All i can say is that's kinda crazy. Not far out there really, seeing as how many people send text messages now adays, it really is/was a matter of time before someone decided to go after them. Can it be done, of course it can be, can it be done as fast as it was done in this case, with a physical person editing the text, highly unlikely. As already pointed out though, it seems that no matter what way i would think of hacking a text message, it would be quite an extensive amount of work, and for what? to see someone fight with their wife?

What scares me here is what type of info people text back and forth, for someone to be able to actually capture all that data if they wanted to (other then the major networks) seems crazy. I mean i never text anything personal back and forth with people, but i'd imagine alot do.

 

[NVash]

I remember I had a problem something like that a few days ago. I was txting a friend and went to play Quake 3. He txted me when I was playing. I ended it shortly afterwards and saw that there was a txt response there that made no sense from me. I thought nothing of it, figured I had accidentally txted him when it was meant to go to someone else. Even so, I still had and have no idea why I txted that, dont recall sending it, it made no sense and the fact that someone could have very well put that there does not surprise me. At that moment and even now, I guess Im in denial. I admit it could be true but I dont want to think of it. The amount of mess that could happen if someone had access to peoples txts and maybe even personal info is a seriously scary thought.

What of the apps? See, this is what was asked before and I even asked when I installed Quake 3 on my phone. Dont they have access to all your info, if they so desire? They could, theoretically, take passwords and everything else off there. People checking their EMails, bank accounts, paying bills on the go, all that info they could basically snatch if they wanted. And whats worse, you cant just say 'Dont use that', because if you dont you have to ask yourself why you have a phone that can do all of that. 'Oh, my phone can get online, pay bills, all that jazz but I never use it. Fear Ill be hacked.' It sounds kinda silly, might as well just downgrade.

 

[icculusX]

I once (using handcent SMS) sent a message to my friend Shawn and my girlfriend got it. Luckly we were both in the same room. I checked to see if I had made a mistake, it was clearly in the 'shawn' window. I even checked my SMSs to her and it wasnt there. Very odd. Also, he never got the message, just her.

Annoying cause what if I were to say somehting like "I wanna squeeze your boobies" or somehting silly to my girlfriend, and it would send to some other random person on my list. That would be instant crazyness!

 

[ShowTime]

Any chance you have a virus on your phone? Unlikely, but they do exist.

Any sources/evidence you can cite for this? Just curious, since to my knowledge, while they are of course feasible, there has yet to be any legitimate/documented virus (read virus, not spyware/adware) found for Android.

 

[mills]

Original poster, have you considered the possibility that the "auto correct" feature kicked in and changed a word to a similarly spelled but different word?

 

[tehpriest]

Txt's are stored on the network providers system for a few weeks and can be accessed by law enforcement agency's with due process. So they can be accessed. Now whether they can be accessed on the fly is a different thing. We have only recently read here of a virus in a weather app. Perhaps one similar could be used to change words or url's in Txt's before or as they are sent?

Also worth reading. http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=5626&tag=nl.e550

 

[hookbill]

Original poster, have you considered the possibility that the "auto correct" feature kicked in and changed a word to a similarly spelled but different word?

This is the most plausible answer. Finally something I can accept, the rest just seems like science fiction to me.

 

[JCo352]

Original poster, have you considered the possibility that the "auto correct" feature kicked in and changed a word to a similarly spelled but different word?

This is the most plausible answer. Finally something I can accept, the rest just seems like science fiction to me.

It's 2010, in 1992 the DROID would have been science fiction.

 

[LtKen]

Any chance you have a virus on your phone? Unlikely, but they do exist.

Not really, but Linux viruses do exist, and since it's running a flavor of the Linux kernel....

Intrusion just seems more reasonable than somone cloning his and his wife's cell.

 

[mchoffa]

Original poster, have you considered the possibility that the "auto correct" feature kicked in and changed a word to a similarly spelled but different word?

no it was a completely different sentence altogether... I said something nice, it got changed to something not so nice... it wasn't done perfectly, it cut off the sentence before it at the next to last word instead of the period, which seems to support the theory of software replacing the text, but, it was in context of the previous two texts I had sent, so that kinda blows that theory unless it was some pretty smart software... which I doubt would exist just to mess with people

I've since removed all the little apps I had on my droid, just keeping the ones I actually use a lot made by "trustworthy" companies... who knows what actually happened... I guess I'll never know...