Episode: 426
Title: HPR0426: Hacking Sprint Voicemail
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0426/hpr0426.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 20:16:46

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Hello, thanks for listening to Hacker Public Radio. I am your host today, Will Jason.
That is J-A-S-E-N. Everybody always confuses. What I'm going to talk about today is how
to access Sprint User's Voiceman. Now, when I say Sprint Users, it doesn't
necessarily mean that you have to be on the Sprint Network. You just have to know, I
guess, your target within the Sprint Network. Their phone number really is all you need.
I came across this because I was talking to a former English professor on my cell phone,
but my battery kept on, so I told her, hey, I will set up my IP phone, and I will call
you back. Unfortunately, the server I have, Astros on, I have had done some reconfigurations,
so Astros wasn't working functionally as far as getting my phone to work. Within 15 minutes,
I was able to get my phone up, and I was going to call her. But before I did that, I wanted
to set my own caller ID, because she is very picky about if she doesn't know the number
that is calling, she won't pick up. I called, but she didn't answer. So, just to be
sure that my caller ID was being set correctly, I called my own cell phone, or I attempted
to anyway. Instead of calling my cell phone, it actually went straight into the voicemail
of my account. At first, I didn't really realize the severity of this, but it quickly
slipped into my mind. I can probably do this to someone else's, so a friend, I also entered
his number as the outgoing caller ID, and I called his number, and sure enough, it went
straight into his voicemail. Now granted, I didn't listen to his voicemail, I just made
sure that it would come up. I also tried a couple of other friends numbers on different
networks, but those networks, they seemed to block it. In fact, I tried all-tell, and
I tried Virgin, and instead of going into voicemail, instead of ringing the phone, it actually
appears to just ring infinitely, or a really long time until somebody hangs up. This is
a perfect example of security through obscurity, and it demonstrates why it does not work well.
One is assuming that nobody is changing their caller IDs, and calling their own number.
However, in this case, I stumbled across it, and luckily, I'm not a very malicious person,
but as I think we all believe here at HPR knowledge is power, and knowledge should be free.
But that's it. This concludes another hacker-public radio. Remember that HPR is community driven,
so that means that anyone could submit an episode. I'm Old Jason, and I remind you, complete
the pattern, solve the puzzle, turn the key.