What is an IMSI catcher?
An IMSI catcher – also known as a cell-site simulator, fake cell tower, rogue base station, StingRay or dirtbox, to name a few of its many descriptors – is a portable device designed to mimic a real cell tower in order to capture cellular data (like locations and call/text metadata) from a connected smartphone. The device does this in part by “catching” the phone’s international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI). At a basic level, an IMSI catcher consists of two main [...]