5 ms·
You're absolutely right about the various advantages of pagers over cell phones. On the other hand, all of that medical information goes over the air in plain
by AgalmicVentures 7y ago
You're absolutely right about the various advantages of pagers over cell phones.
On the other hand, all of that medical information goes over the air in plain text. It is trivial to capture and decode POCSAG [1], requiring less than $100 of hardware: a Raspberry Pi 3 has enough horsepower to handle the 2 RTL-SDR's needed to capture both the 929MHz and 931MHz bands.
Modern security simply demands that pagers go away (or at least be heavily modified). This is not a theoretical concern [2][3].
[1] https://github.com/pvachon/tsl-sdr https://github.com/pvachon/tsl-sdr
[2] https://www.rtl-sdr.com/art-installation-eavesdrops-on-hospital-pagers-with-a-hackrf/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/art-installation-eavesdrops-on-hospi...
[3] https://openprivacy.ca/blog/2019/09/09/open-privacy-discovers-vancouver-patient-medical-data-breach/ https://openprivacy.ca/blog/2019/09/09/open-privacy-discover...
- asdaddasdad 7y agoDoes the paged text typically contain information that can identify the patient?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- satanspastaroll 7y agoI'd imagine it to be trivial to also send malicious signals and jam the system.
- giancarlostoro 7y agoThat sounds like any radio frequency though. Alao a great way to get the FCC knocking on your door sooner or later.
- satanspastaroll 7y agoTrue you could create a trash beacon for any frequency, but as you said it'd be very "loud". Disrupting service with seemingly innocent messages would be much harder to detect though
- giancarlostoro 7y agoOh I see, you're suggesting a very specified attack. Sounds like a smaller scale Stingray or something, but for beepers. Edit: Yeah I'm not entirely familiar with interference detection, but I would always suspect some HAM somewhere will figure it out and report it.
- hannob 7y agoI looked into some of such cases in Germany, there the answer was definitely yes. Names and addresses, coupled with extremely sensitive medical information.
- lunchables 7y agohttps://www.kansascity.com/news/business/health-care/article213414334.html https://www.kansascity.com/news/business/health-care/article... "An information technology worker from Johnson County recently told The Star about the issue after he stumbled across hospital pager information while playing with an antenna, which he bought to get TV channels on his laptop computer. With a simple program, the antenna picks up radio signals that can be digitized. Except instead of picking up local TV stations, he started seeing things like this, with the patient's and doctor's names included: RQSTD RTM: (patient's name) 19 M Origin Unit: EDOF Admitting: (doctor's name) Level of Care: 1st Avail Medical Diagnosis: TONSILAR BLEED, ANEMIA, THROMBOCYTOPENIA It was the personal patient data of a 19-year-old man, broadcast across the airwaves for anyone to read. And it was coming from a local hospital, which was sending the message to a doctor on a pager."
- theclaw 7y agoMaybe I’m living in the 1970s but I always assumed pagers just showed a phone number and you were supposed to call back?
- gambiting 7y agoNo, you can definitely send a text message to them, they just don't have the ability to send anything back.
- 83457 7y agoExcept for the 2-way ones
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y agoWhat next? 2-way voice communication!? ;)
- m23khan 7y agothe most basic pagers can only receive callback number. More advanced ones have additional features to display text messages as well.
- chrisseaton 7y agoIf you can send a sequence of digits, you can also send a sequence of letters (a text message) using the same technology.
- emilfihlman 7y ago>the 2 RTL-SDR's needed to capture both the 929MHz and 931MHz bands. A single R820T can do about 2.56MHz bandwidth, which is enough to handle both bands simultaneously.
- alxlaz 7y agoUnfortunately, it's pretty hard to get all the security benefits of modern technology without the distraction, the sloppy user interface, the complexity (and attack surface) and user hostility -- in a word, without the incredibly poor design -- of modern technology. A pager-like device with proper encryption isn't extraordinarily challenging. But planned obsolescence or selling ads is pretty hard to do with this sort of technology, so despite plenty of interest from users, there's not that much interest from companies.
- SSLy 7y agoHave you ever used Signal?
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y agoTo be fair it generally costs money to send a page. It's the expectation of free messaging that creates the need for advertising - unless people are willing to go back to the days of paying per message.