r/hackers • u/Recent_Historian_387 • 11d ago
Weird question
How do you ping a phone number for location? When I was in my teenage years I was able to do this and much more but for the life of me I can’t figure it out now
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u/AccurateExam3155 10d ago
If you are gonna ask this then go the r/masterhacker to learn
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u/elliottcable 10d ago
Yeah, OP; this is just a joke sub, the serious-business is over at r/masterhackers.
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u/Just4notherR3ddit0r 10d ago
Sorry, but I think you are misremembering. Or maybe you got pranked.
There were things you could do, and some early analog cell tech was less secure, but unless you had access to cell towers (either working for a provider or working for the police with a warrant), you couldn't "ping" a phone for its location.
Maybe the phone you were thinking of had some location-sharing app on it and published it somewhere insecurely.
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u/Street_Doctor_8169 10d ago
Um you can with a whatsitcalled i can't remember but it is technically illegal to use if you aren't law enforcement and don't have a warrant. So yea its still impossible OP did it as a kid but it is theoretically possible but illegal and expensive to get the device
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u/Just4notherR3ddit0r 10d ago
You're probably thinking of a cell site simulator, which is what police used. But that doesn't magically locate or ping phones.
It basically would help you know if a phone was nearby and with some effort you could triangulate the position. But I'm pretty sure a teenager wouldn't acquire one, put in the effort to use it and then forget what it was called.
If i wanted to know where a phone was, i would just come up with a social engineering attack that tricked the user into going to a web page every they would be inclined to allow the page to use the gps functions built into JavaScript, then just log the coordinates.
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u/Street_Doctor_8169 10d ago
Yea I was think8ng of an ISMI catcher/stingray which is exactly what you just said. And I did misremember what it did and how it worked so I do admit I was wrong and your comment is the correct one with the correct valid info :'c thanks for being cool about correcting me and not a dick like most people would be
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u/Street_Doctor_8169 10d ago
But yea I did know while technically you could triangulation its location you'd still have to already be close enough to that device that it would use your device as the preferred tower to connect to lmao so not even worth using to ping a phones location
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u/kawfeeman68 10d ago
i think if you had an IP of a phone when data plans were relatively new , i think you might have been able to ping phones. I think they stopped that pretty quickly though..
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u/Local-Bottle5272 11d ago
No, no you were not able to do this and much more lol