How secure is your cellphone?

I'm a 17 year old girl who uses the internet for facebook, and that's basically it. After hearing about a silly drama regarding text messages, I remembered this! I only heard the ad, but it still sprung to mind. It took me less than one minute to track down the software, I signed up and I instantly saw how to 'change SenderID'. I was utterly disgusted. This software needs to be disabled asap. This little situation I heard about has resulted in broken relationships, destroyed friendships and even threats to beat people up. All over FAKE txt messages? Drama central!

whats the softwares name?

I think it was absoluting disgusting that they would air something like that for the very reason that it puts people in danger now...as for the paedophile comment above, it could happen...the paedophile might be the childs relative etc etc!! and bullying at schools will get worse, i'm sure we all know how nasty and immature kids can be!! it's appalling that they let people know about this software. i'm really disapointed in campbell.

Of greater concern is that the sites that enable this activity require you to register. They are therefore capturing real personal information in the form of email addresses, payment details and the real mobile phone numbers people are using on the sites. What a great source of information for phishing and spam factories. The biggest messages are to protect your personal information - including phone numbers - and to not trust electronic communications implicitly.

it's not software, it's a bloody website. typical stupid journo can't tell the difference.

Whats the name of the program used? I have no txts left!

The entire story was overblown, and a great example of the majority failing to understand modern technology. The SMS suite of protocols allow for the sender field of messages to be set arbitrarily *by design*. This is analogous to SMTP used for the sending and receiving of email messages. Being able to specify any email 'From:' address has been a reality since the dawn of time - again by design. The journalists involved in making the story would have been wise to read some Short Message Service related technical specifications to understand the systems they were trying to report on. Only the social engineering aspects of the story were relevant; although again these did not tell us anything new (with the possible exception of providing budding pedophiles with some new techniques). The same social engineering tactics could be used to expose 'flaws' in the postal service - I could send a letter to you saying it was from John Key! In short: this is neither a loophole, nor an 'insecurity'; it is expected behaviour.

Can someone tell me the name of the software please? :)

funny story. This software has been around for quite a few years, it didn't just come on the scene a year ago. Also the example given in the story is just plain idiotic. So a paedophile is going to get the phone numbers of a child and their parents, and know when the parent texts their child to meet them somewhere, and then text them to meet them elsewhere. Tell me, in the past few years that this software has been available has it happened once around the world? The answer is no.

Was it really necessary to have that irritating ring-tone "music" coming and going through the WHOLE story?!