How ’60 Minutes’ played ‘Telephone’ with public-hacking hysteria

On Sunday, 60 Minutes took a year-old segment on phone hacking it shot and aired in Australia, fluffed it up with other old hacks from last year’s Def Con and repackaged it for an American audience.

Almost no one noticed those particular details.

But just about everyone panicked. “Hacking Your Phone” set off a scare that raged through headlines and social media all week. As the miasmic cherries on top, the episode also freaked out California Rep. Ted Lieu (D), who has called for a congressional investigation, and the FCC is now involved.

The 13-minute segment based its hysteria on a hole in phone-routing protocol SS7 (Signaling System 7), a flaw which, incidentally, isn’t easy to exploit. But perhaps thinking the combination of hacker boogeymen and SS7’s potential wouldn’t make for dramatic TV, the show blurred in a handful of different — and extremely unrelated — ways that smartphones can be hacked. For the full article click here 

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