GSM Security Broken, Finally

It was well known for a long time that A5/1, the GSM encryption code is not secure. Now it has finally been broken. Nobody ever believed that our phone calls were safe from the secret services of this world. The issue is that now the calls and, even worse, SMSes are vulnerable to criminals, too. This is a problem M-TANs are used in online banking, for example.

But not all is lost: UMTS uses another algorithm, called MISTY or KASUMI, which is still considered safe. So, use M-TANs only if you have a 3G uplink.