SIM cards cracked: hundreds of millions of mobile phones vulnerable

Karsten Nohl, founder of Berlin's Security Research Labs (SRL), has given basic details of more detailed research that he intends to present at Black Hat. Some details have been presented in a brief paper on the SRL website, and more in interviews with Forbes and the New York Times.

Forbes states that using his technique, hackers could start with a list of one hundred phones and ultimately compromise 13 with a virus. This would suggest that around the world, something like 500 million phones are vulnerable. According to the NYT, however, Nohl "estimates as many as 750 million phones may be vulnerable to attacks."