Security News > 2020 > January > Burner phones are an eavesdropping risk for international travelers

In recent years, burner phones have become an obligatory part of the international business traveler's toolkit.

Though these devices are designed to minimize the amount of stored data available for capture by malicious actors in a foreign country, burner phones actually give attackers an opening to another, potentially more valuable, form of data: conversations that occur during key meetings in the vicinity of the device.

In this article, I'll explore the threat of mobile eavesdropping targeting the burner phones of executives and other corporate employees traveling to high-risk countries and look at some mitigations for this emerging risk.

Since burner phones are intended to provide a minimal data footprint in the likely event of compromise, they generally do nothing to mitigate the capture of data in vicinity of the device, including the sensitive conversations that occur in the closed-door meetings that brought the executive to the country in the first place.

Even savvy travelers who do the right things - disabling Bluetooth, not connecting to unknown networks, never leaving their phone out of sight - are still at risk of conversations being eavesdropped on through their burner phones.

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