Researchers find new flaws in 4G and 5G letting hackers perform a targeted denial of service attack on a phone and track its location using ~$200 in equipment
A group of academics have found three new security flaws in 4G and 5G, which they say can be used to intercept phone calls and track the locations of cell phone users.
Context & Ripple Effects
This disclosure extends a line of academic work on cellular core-network weaknesses rather than opening a new front: the same research community had already mapped ten possible attacks on LTE networks a year earlier, covering eavesdropping, device takedown, and emergency-alert spoofing. What changes here is cost and reach — the new flaws hit both 4G and the then-emerging 5G standard, and the required equipment runs to roughly $200.
The finding also sits alongside parallel work on operator signaling: Citizen Lab has since shown how vulnerabilities in roaming-signaling protocols let attackers geolocate devices, and later documented two spying campaigns abusing SS7 and Diameter across every generation from 2G to 5G. Together they show location tracking is not a per-generation bug but a recurring property of how networks exchange control data.
First-order effects
- Carriers running 4G and early 5G networks face a demonstrated, low-cost attack path against their subscribers: any phone on their network can be knocked offline or located by an attacker with commodity radio gear.
Second-order effects
- Equipment vendors and standards bodies are pushed into patch-and-harden cycles for signaling layers, while enterprise and government customers with mobile fleets gain fresh leverage to demand location-leak protections in carrier contracts.
Third-order effects
- If each generation keeps inheriting or re-creating these control-plane weaknesses, cellular security shifts from a handset problem to a network-design problem — pushing regulators and operators toward treating subscriber location as infrastructure that must be defended at the protocol level, not left to individual fixes.
The trend: Cellular security research keeps showing that each network generation — through 2G, 3G, 4G, and now 5G — reproduces signaling weaknesses that put subscriber tracking and denial-of-service within reach of low-budget attackers.