Not so much phone hacking then.... more like accessing people's voicemail using the factory default pin numbers..... euch

[tricot39]

Reading between the lines it seems that there is not a high tech way of hacking phones. Those who were hacked seemed to have failed to change their default pin numbers in many cases! Why has noone pointed this out and made it more widely known to the public? Go out dear mumsnetters and changeth your pins!

It's a cheek trying to access anothers phone. Apparently loads of people have 1234, password etc as passwords on their email, do they deserve their info being accessed?

Well, it's illegal more than a cheek. But yes, I thought it had long been known that 'phone hacking' consisted (in many cases) of little more than remote dialling into voice mail and trying the default PIN to see if it would work.

What intrigues me more is why anyone has incriminating stuff on their voicemail in the first place. (Not that that means they deserve to be hacked and have the stuff printed). But you'd think these celebs could have got the hang of the veiled voicemail, i.e. "hello, it's Liz Hurley here, quite cross, call me back", or whatever.

It's not very sophisticated hacking but it's still an invasion of privacy. Yes, it might be sensible to change your PIN code but you still don't deserve to have your information accessed. You wouldn't think someone deserved to have their money stolen from their online bank because they picked a rubbish password.

(I work in the media, by the way. I can just find stories without phone hacking. I don't break the law. Anyway, we're all about scraping search engines for interesting files these days....).

Plus, hacking seems like a lot of effort to go to instead of just "making stuff up". Not suggesting you do this, RubyrooUK, but a lot of these stories are just so fanciful they can't even be based on inadmissible evidence like a voicemail.

Don't worry Tribpot, I've got thick skin when it comes to my profession!

I guess the problem is that with 24/7 news coverage, celebrity blogs and so on, some papers were driving their reporters to ridiculous lengths for stories to compete. And also, papers are constantly rung up by celebrities' PRs, tipping you off that Miss X will be looking sad today near that restaurant where she was seen last night fighting with her boyfriend. So all the waters got muddied. I can see how people started to think that phone hacking wasn't really an invasion of privacy or particularly wrong even. It was all just part of the game to them.

Luckily for the British public, neither I or my colleagues can work our own voicemails so everyone is safe.

This has been known ever since the story became public several years ago.

I would bet that a lot of people didn't even know that they could dial in and listen to their mobile phone voice mails from another phone. I certainly didn't. Why would you need to?

Well for a start it is handy if your phone is lost or broken and it is cheaper way of getting messages when abroad.....

I'm going to do a survey at work. You are all clearly much more clued up than me. I think of "hacking" in an IT sense and that some degree of technical ability was required - hence the need for "specialists" to be employed...... Have i just missed a load of articles spelling out the problem or is it all just implied?

Anyway, we're all about scraping search engines for interesting files these days....

Is that the same as googling stuff or is it much more complicated and techy?

I think hacking does imply something more sophisticated than just 'put in 1111' (or whatever the network default password is), although strictly speaking it does just mean exploiting any weakness in a computer system. In this case, given our bank cards don't come pre-programmed with a PIN of 1111 until you change it, perhaps voicemail shouldn't either?

Plenty, it is like Googling. But with more maths.

To explain scraping, say that I think that missing people is an interesting topic. There will be websites holding the data of the people missing in the UK. But it may not all be in the same place or same format and the government may never have compared all the data.

So I might scrape all that information off the internet into a database. Then I would look for interesting anomalies or trends. So I might spot that a really high number of missing people are girls aged between 16-18. That would be a relevant story. Or that far more brunettes than blondes go missing each year. That would be a fun story if it was a more lighthearted topic than missing people.

This is NOT a true life example, by the way. I'm just illustrating how scraping can work. It's basically gathering a lot of data that is available and finding the stories in it. It can be especially useful if it's something the government wouldn't want to disclose otherwise.

I regret to say that many, many years ago, I found out my manager's password and read her email. (It was very dull, disappointingly.) That was "hacking" in a way though it didn't involve any technical wizardry on my part.

One of the tricks that Dan Evans described did seem to involve a bit more sophistication, though I didn't really understand it. It required him to phone a celebrity's mobile number, and let it ring a couple of times without them answering. Then you phoned again a few seconds later and it would go through to voicemail. I didn't get what this was about, though, as obviously going through to voicemail is not at all the same as listening to existing voicemails. Can anyone else explain?