A Fake Cell Tower Disguised as an Office Printer

The Stealth Cell Tower is a GSM base station masquerading as an HP laserjet office printer. As its creator Julian Oliver explains, the project “brings the covert design practice of disguising cellular infrastructure as other things — like trees and lamp-posts — indoors, while mimicking technology used by police and intelligence agencies to surveil mobile phone users.”

The tower works by detecting nearby smartphones and sending them a series of SMS messages that appear to be from someone they might know. Aside from that, the printer will occasionally prank call the owner with a serenade of Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called To Say I Love You.”

The Stealth Cell Tower then prints out a transcript revealing the responses to each message sent, along with the victim’s unique IMSInumber and other identifying info.

In terms of hardware, the “antagonistic GSM base station” is equipped with a BladeRF x40, Raspberry Pi 3, and a pair of omnidirectional antennas. As for its software, the Stealth Cell Tower was built using the open-source YateBTS API.

Intrigued? You can read more about the project on Oliver’s website here.

[h/t Creative Applications]