Russian Tech Lets Your Boss Snoop on Your Mobile Calls

A device using former KGB spy technology can equip companies with the means to eavesdrop on employees' mobile phone conversations in the office. A Russian company run by CEO Natalya Kaspersky, a co-founder of Kaspersky Lab, has begun marketing the eavesdropping tech to organizations that wish to safeguard confidential information.

Kaspersky's company is called InfoWatch. The firm develops solutions for communications monitoring, including technology that can spy on landline phones, e-mails and messaging apps. Its most popular product is the InfoWatch KRIBRUM Traffic Monitor service that can track and analyze data from the web and social media.

Kapersky told Bloomberg that InfoWatch even possesses technology that can extract encrypted messages from smartphone texting apps such as Whatsapp and Telegram. The only major gap in their service was the ability to intercept voice call traffic on mobile phones, but they've since managed to crack that problem.

Here's how it works. The tech makes use of a femtocell, a small base station for mobile phone traffic. The femtocell naturally intercepts mobile phone calls made on the premises, with the purpose of amplifying the signals to better put them through to the broader mobile phone network.

With help from the femtocell, the InfoWatch monitoring service eavesdrops on the signal traffic using espionage technology that was used in the Soviet Union by the KGB. It collects the voice traffic and transcribes it into text that is analyzed by a machine for suspicious content, such as indications that an employee is leaking confidential information. This it does by looking for specific keywords.

Russia & India Report says the system can be configured to monitor only those voice calls that originate from mobile phones using company SIM cards. Calls made on personal cellphones will be disregarded. Of course, the monitoring service is technically capable of intercepting all calls made on the premises.