6 apps to obtain LAC & CellID for GSM tracking

In order to determine the location of your cell phone using cell towers, you need to know the LAC (Location Area Code) and CellID of the cell tower your cell phone is currently connected to. Then you can enter the LAC, CellID and other data to locate your handset location, this is how cell tower based locating works. Google Maps and other mobile locating apps use cell tower/base station data to determine the location of cell phone as well.

Although you can always enter test mode/field test to get these data, it’s not suitable for normal users, so we can try some cell phone apps to help us.

Symbian

As the world’s most used mobile OS, Symbian mobile devices are very popular here; I myself own two Symbian Smartphones. As a cell phone to make calls and send SMS, Nokia keyboard cell phone is a great success, that’s why lots of people use Nokia mobile devices.

CellTrack. Cell track is a little app running on Symbian to collect the CellID, LAC, Mobile Country Code/Network Code, signal strength and battery usage data of your mobile device.

Fieldtest. Fieldtest (just Google it) can do what Cell Tracker can do for you, at the same time, it shows available cell towers around, if you find a cell tower of good signal quality, you can lock it and enjoy better cell reception. But keep in mind that you need to unlock when you move to another place, otherwise you may find your handset receives signal.

Viking informatics.  Viking informatics, in fact, a piece of web-based mobile tracking app for Symbian devices (you can set up a server to receive data with supplied files). In the meantime, it can be used to get a variety of data such as IMEI, CellID and LAC etc.

Android

Net Monitor. Net Monitor is based on Android and it can help obtain the name of your carrier, signal type (for example EDGE), CellID, LAC and signal strength.

Cell Finder. Please it’s not cell phone finder, but it does what it means. Cell finder can show the cell tower/base station information your handset is connected to and other neighboring cell towers. It can also acquire the GPS coordinates of your handset location.

Cell Tower Locator. Cell Tower Locator is another Android based app derived from Cell Finder. It shows the MCC, MNC, CellID, LAC and signal strength in dBm. Also GPS information are displayed.

GSM signal monitoring. This app promises neighboring cell towers information. Unfortunately I only see the cell tower my handset is connected to. You can download it here.

There’s many more, search on Google Play for yourself.

iPhone

Well for iPhone OS 4.0 (not included) earlier, you can use the test mode/Field test to get these data. Type *3001#12345#* when it’s standby, you can enter Field test and get the MCC, MNC, CellID and LAC.

iPhone Signal. It’s said that this app was developed by Dev-Team, you can buy from Cydia, and it works on iOS 4 as well. You can get the MCC, MNC, CellID and LAC with this app as well. What’s more, it shows on maps the cell tower you connected to, the available and unavailable cell towers as well, which is interesting as you can see the density of the cell towers. Always remember, you can get more accurate location data with more cell towers. However I have not tried it as I do not own an iPhone.

After you get the Cell ID, LAC, MCC and MNC, try GSM tracking, or create a mobile locating app.

P.S. CellID database for reference (http://www.opencellid.org/, http://cellphonetrackers.org/gsm/gsm-tracker.php).

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Six Mobile Forensics Tools

What is Mobile Device Forensics?
Mobile device forensics is directly connected to digital forensics and can be defined as being the recovery of digital information or data which is often used for criminal evidence. Mobile Device Forensics by definition applies only to mobile devices, e.g. tablets, cell phones etc, but it the term also includes any portable digital device that has both internal memory and communication abilities such as PDA devices and also GPS devices.

Mobile Forensics Tools
Our list is a mix of open source and commercial digital forensics tools used in forensics tools are typically platform-specific and are configured to address smartphone analysis. Here are a few examples:

(If you can think of a tool that we might be missing please let us know in the comments below, thanks!)

» iPhone Analyzer
The iPhone Analyzer allows you to forensically investigate and recover data from within an iOS device. The iPhone Analyzer is a forensic tool that works with iTunes and supports all the latest iOS devices. This security tool, which is Java based, works on every major Operating System. The developers website contains a lot more information but in summary this forensics tool can, for example, recover “deleted” sqlite records (as long as they have not been purged by the device). This tool also allows users to browse the device file structure and can analyze jail broken devices directly over SSH.

» BitPim
BitPim is certainly worth checking out if you are interested in mobile forensics. BitPim, which is free to download and use, allows the user to view and manipulate data on most CDMA phones. The tool is very well supported and their website contains a lot more information including screen shots.

» viaForensics’ Forensics
These guys have many excellent mobile forensics tools which they have developed – many of which are free to use! Out of all the resources in this post we’d recommend these guys the most. One of their key products is viaExtract, a program which allows the user to extract data from Android devices, crack passphrases and PINS and to examine images from external (SD) and internal (EMMC) storage cards. This program, which is one of their commerical products, works on many of the most popular Android smart phones and mobile devices.

» Mobile Internal Acquisition Tool (MIAT)
Follow this link for a really great resource into this tool which discusses a crucial aspect of Mobile Device Forensics, i.e. the recovery of deleted SMS Text Messages. We are not 100% sure if this tool is publically available and if anyone reading this can help us locate where to find it we’d been very grateful!

» TULP2G
Although their website has not been updated for several years the actual framework seems to have been updated just this April 2013 so if you are interested in mobile forensics then certainly take a look at TULP2G. By their own definition, “TULP2G is a forensic software framework developed to make it easy to extract and decode data from digital devices.”

» Katana Forensics’ Lantern Lite Imager
This product, which we believe is at version 3, is a well known mobile forensics tool which seems to be particularly well suited for iOS devices such as iPhones, the iPod Touch, and iPads. The Latern (as the folks behind the tool prefer to call it) allows the user to parse and triage a Mac running OSX or a Mac OSX image and also allows for data extraction, analaysis, and auditing.

Summary
With the continued growth of mobile and portable devices and the decline of the desktop market, digital mobile forensics will continue to become a popular subject and skills within this space will be very much in demand, especially if you are interested in following a career in digital forensics. Let us know your thoughts below, and please add a tool if you think we might have missed one (which I am sure we have since there are dozens of them out there).