The tricks of the hacking trade

LONDON: The term ''phone hacking'' refers broadly to a variety of methods journalists at the News of the World and other British newspapers could have used to listen to thousands of voice-mail messages until the scandal came to light.
A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police, the force investigating the matter, said it was defining the practice as ''the illegal interception of messages relayed by telecommunications that were not intended for the person who has intercepted them'' but gave no specifics.
In practice, as court documents and interviews with those involved have demonstrated, the hacking involved a number of techniques.

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They took advantage of default codes - such as 1111 or 4444 - that mobile phone providers in Britain gave users to retrieve their voicemail. Many customers did not change this standard number to a more secure code, allowing hackers to use it in one of two ways.
In the first way, according to current and former tabloid journalists interviewed for an investigation by The New York Times Magazine into the practice, one reporter would call the intended victim's phone, engaging the line. A second reporter would call simultaneously and would be directed to the voice-mail system. There the default codes could be entered, potentially allowing access to messages (which were then often deleted to prevent other rival newspapers from hearing them).
The second method was detailed on a recording obtained by The New York Times as part of the same investigation. In the recording, Glenn Mulcaire, a private detective jailed for six months in 2007 for phone hacking, described a method of calling into a voicemail system by dialling an external number provided for checking messages from other telephones, such as land lines. It, too, required the default code to be entered.
If any of the intended victims had changed their codes, the hackers would resort to what they called ''blagging'' - calling mobile phone companies, pretending to be authorised users or company insiders, and requesting that the access code be reset to the default.
Britain's main phone companies - Orange, Vodafone, O2, Three and T-Mobile - said in interviews on Wednesday that their voicemail access procedures had become more stringent since the early 2000s, the heyday for phone hacking.
The New York Times


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