GPS Weakness Could Enable Mass Smartphone Hacking

Weaknesses in the technology that allows smartphone users to pinpoint themselves on a map, or check into restaurants and bars using apps such as Foursquare, could allow those users to be tracked remotely.

Ralf-Philipp Weimann, a researcher at the University of Luxembourg, reported this finding at the Black Hat computer security conference in Las Vegas yesterday. He believes that the complex mechanism by which phones get location fixes likely also hides vulnerabilities that could allow the mechanism to be used to install and run malicious code on the device.