GSM Encryption Cracked: Karsten Nohl Posts Phone Hack Torrent

Worryingly, Karsten and his crew of merry men obtained the binary codes by simple brute force -- they fed enough random strings of numbers in to effectively guess the password.

This is not the first time GSM was “cracked”. In 2003, the method by which GSM’s encryption code could be cracked was uncovered by a team of Israeli researchers and in 2008, David Hulton and Steve Muller presented at Black Hat a technique for the successful interception and decryption of a GSM stream using $1,000 of hardware and a half hour of time.