SMS Security

Today I was reading an article in times of India titled "How secure is your SMS". It basically aimed at telling the people that whatever communication we do through our cell phones can be hacked. If we want to send a sms to another person initially the sms will be sent from our phone to our service provider, from our service provider it will be sent to other recipient’s service provider and from there the sms will be delivered into the receiver’s cell. Practically the process is bit complicated. initially the sms will be sent to local receiver and from there it will be sent to global receiver where it identifies the receivers network providers address and will be sent to other centralized receiver of other network and from there it identifies the transmitting tower nearest to the recipients location and sends it to that tower and from there the sms will be received. The time stamp will be attached to the msg in the cell itself. The article told that these network providers are not connected to internet and hence it is nearly impossible to hack these networks. But what hackers do is they write some spyware and install it in targets cell phone. The catch is that the software has to be manually loaded onto the target phone to be tapped. It then hijacks the entire system. But there would no indication of the presence of the software. Each time an SMS is sent or received by the target phone, the malware sends a duplicate one to the clients monitoring phone. There are text alerts for incoming /outgoing calls. The hackers can also listen in on live calls. But for all these things to happen the hacker should get access to the target phone and if it is not possible there is no way we can hack the network providers line of transmission. I was really surprised to know that these networks are so secure.