[Cryptography] Bizarre behavior of a non-smart mobile phone

[mok-kong shen]

Am 17.05.2017 um 21:56 schrieb Ray Dillinger:
> On 05/16/2017 11:58 PM, mok-kong shen wrote:
>> BTW, in the meantime I think I have found a good literature that seems
>> to indicate that the
>> communications over the cellular networks are indeed very highly
>> vulnerable to intrusions
>> by hackers.
>>
>> Oh yeah, that's always been true and everybody knows it.  Phone security
>> bites rocks and every effort to fix it has always been gutted before it
>> actually hit the ground.   Don't put anything you want to keep private
>> on a phone.  I don't even keep a contact list on mine.
[snip]
>> The question with your phone was never about whether somebody *COULD*
>> be getting into into it; monitoring any mobile phone is easy, and there
>> are well-known programs on darknet sites to install unwanted software on
>> most of them, either via wireless or through a fake tower. It was about
>> whether anyone would want to produce that specific behavior and how
>> they'd benefit from it.
>>
>> To a lesser extent, it might be about whether your "dumb" phone actually
>> has an OS capable of running any software that isn't loaded into the
>> firmware at manufacture, but most of them do.  Or whether anyone can get
>> unwanted software onto it, but with most of them someone can.
>>
>> Dozens of different kinds of people put up fake cell towers.
>> Intelligence services, police with warrants, advertisers, corporate
>> espionage, mobsters, foreign spies, malware distributors, spammers,
>> script kiddies, whatever: it's a free-for-all.
[snip]

Very unfortunately I am incapable to answer the question which you wrote 
that
I should ask myself. An analogy: I am definitely not a rich person but 
also not a
very very poor guy. I do have some fear that someone could someday steal
things from my apartment, so I have an insurance contract for that and take
care always to lock the door when I go out. Now could I answer the question
whether someone, including (a) for fun of breaking doors and taking a look,
(2) a common thief, (3) one from an authority that, whether correctly or 
incorrectly
according to the law, secretly does a search based on correct or incorrect
informations that he obtains? How could I ever be capable to answer such a
question sensibly??

As I wrote earlier, as a layman I am (only) interested to learn whether, 
and if yes
how, mobile phones could be hacked technically, i.e. in the above 
analogy, how
the door of my apartment could be opened by a foreign person.

M. K. Shen