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I saw Balint Seeber give a fascinating talk about discovering the use of unencrypted pagers in hospitals, with messages full of personal information available t

I saw Balint Seeber give a fascinating talk about discovering the use of unencrypted pagers in hospitals, with messages full of personal information available too anyone with an SDR (and his particular brand of persistence to work out how to discover the modulation/encoding to get the text out.) It's mentioned in passing in this talk description from 2011: https://2011.ruxcon.org.au/2011-talks/all-your-rfz-belong-to-me-hacking-the-wireless-world-with-gnu-radio/ https://2011.ruxcon.org.au/2011-talks/all-your-rfz-belong-to... " ... and security-through-obscurity in hospital pager systems." I'm 99% certain I saw him give that talk at Dorkbot in Sydney, which make it maybe 5 or more years earlier than that...

myself248 7y ago
"discovering" is an odd word to use there. I'd say "noticing". PDW has been going since 2003 and I only mention it because I can't remember the name of the DOS software that preceded it... https://www.discriminator.nl/pdw/index-en.html https://www.discriminator.nl/pdw/index-en.html
- bigiain 7y ago
  I only worded it like that because of the way he described his long and often unfruitful efforts over several years before he finally hit upon the right keywords and documentation to describe what he was seeing over the air...
  - myself248 7y ago
    That's a confusion born of not spending enough time hanging out with sneaky folks doing shady shit. I remember that in the 90s, the local PD had learned that some folks would listen to scanner traffic to figure out when their rowdy parties were going to be broken up, so everyone could hide and make the scene look calm by the time officers arrived. So they stopped using voice radios for this sort of call, and instead switched to their Mobile Data Terminals. Which was even better, because MDTMON had an alert feature where it'd sound the PC speaker when your keywords (say, your street name) showed up in the decoded traffic. That freed up one partygoer from scanner duty! POCSAG/FLEX were even more of a treasure trove, but that's a story for another day.
- specialist 7y ago
  "Noticing". Thanks. I feel weird saying I've "discovered" or "found" something that's merely new to me. I left "uncovered" untried, because I don't consider myself that clever. I'll try "noticed" and see if it flows better.

myself248 7y ago

"discovering" is an odd word to use there. I'd say "noticing". PDW has been going since 2003 and I only mention it because I can't remember the name of the DOS software that preceded it... https://www.discriminator.nl/pdw/index-en.html https://www.discriminator.nl/pdw/index-en.html

bigiain 7y ago
I only worded it like that because of the way he described his long and often unfruitful efforts over several years before he finally hit upon the right keywords and documentation to describe what he was seeing over the air...
- myself248 7y ago
  That's a confusion born of not spending enough time hanging out with sneaky folks doing shady shit. I remember that in the 90s, the local PD had learned that some folks would listen to scanner traffic to figure out when their rowdy parties were going to be broken up, so everyone could hide and make the scene look calm by the time officers arrived. So they stopped using voice radios for this sort of call, and instead switched to their Mobile Data Terminals. Which was even better, because MDTMON had an alert feature where it'd sound the PC speaker when your keywords (say, your street name) showed up in the decoded traffic. That freed up one partygoer from scanner duty! POCSAG/FLEX were even more of a treasure trove, but that's a story for another day.
specialist 7y ago
"Noticing". Thanks. I feel weird saying I've "discovered" or "found" something that's merely new to me. I left "uncovered" untried, because I don't consider myself that clever. I'll try "noticed" and see if it flows better.