The agency is able to extract data from all the major mobile operating systems

Sep 9, 2013 06:45 GMT  ·  By
The NSA can break into phones running all three major mobile operating systems
   The NSA can break into phones running all three major mobile operating systems

The latest reveal from the Edward Snowden leak shows that the NSA has ways of breaking into the major mobile operating systems to retrieve data from targeted phones. That the NSA is interested in smartphones is not surprising in itself.

But the agency has diverted a lot of efforts into this and has different teams for iOS, Android, and BlackBerry, the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel claims.

Der Spiegel has had access to some documents from the Snowden leaks, probably courtesy of filmmaker Laura Poitras, who has been working with Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald on the leaked documents and lives in Berlin.

The NSA's methodology for phones is similar to what we've seen so far; the agency uses any means it can to break into a phone or acquire data from it.

For example, one simple way of gaining data from an iPhone is to hack into a computer that can sync with the phone and then just wait for it to be plugged in.

More worrying perhaps are the NSA's capabilities of breaking into Blackberry. The troubled phone maker is able to hang onto its customers in the business and political world thanks, in part, to its allegedly secure services.

But the NSA documents reveal that the security measures don't do much to stop the spies. SMS traffic and even emails sent via BlackBerry's allegedly very secure service can be intercepted.

BlackBerry denies that the NSA has any backdoor access into its services and Der Spiegel says that the documents it has seen back that up. Any phone spying has been a targeted affair and the agency doesn't have the capability of capturing data in mass.

The magazine doesn't focus much on Android, but the open source operating system is probably the easiest to break into, by virtue of being open. It's not hard to imagine the NSA creating purpose-built malware for Android, like it already does for computers, routers, and so on.