Cell phone hackers can find out your location without you being aware of it, researchers have discovered. Cellular network leak cell phone users’ locations, which means that a third party can quite easily track the cell phone user’s location without their knowledge or consent, according to brand new research by computers scientists who work at the College of Science and Engineering in the University of Minnesota.

Dennis Foo Kune, a computer science PhD student, working with associate professors Yongdae Kim and Nick Hopper, as well as undergraduate student John Koelndorfer, has described their work on recently released paper “Location Leaks on the GSM Air Interface”, which has been presented in San Diego in California at the 19th Annual Network & Distributed System Security Symposium.

“Cell phone towers have to track cell phone subscribers to provide service efficiently,” says Foo Kune. “For example, an incoming voice call requires the network to locate that device so it can allocate the appropriate resources to handle the call. Your cell phone network has to at least loosely track your phone within large regions in order to make it easy to find it.”

The consequence of this is that the tower broadcasts a page to your phone and waits for it to respond when you receive a call. “That communication is not unlike a CB radio,” Foo Kune points out. “Further, it is possible for a hacker to force those messages to go out and hang up before the victim is able to hear their phone ring.”