Malicious SIMs can shut down phones, steal files, and drag 5G back to 2G
Give that ability to a hostile SIM, and things get rather more interesting. REG AD googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('labrador/thereg/article/desktop/b'); }); Tomasz Piotr Lisowski and Marius Muench of the University of Birmingham, working with Fuzzware's Kristian Covic, built a toolkit called CATANA to see what a malicious SIM could get away with. REG AD googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('labrador/thereg/article/desktop/c'); }); They tested 26 devices – 18 smartphones and eight IoT modems – and found that nine exposed an AT command interface to the SIM.
- ▪Give that ability to a hostile SIM, and things get rather more interesting.
- ▪REG AD googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('labrador/thereg/article/desktop/b'); }); Tomasz Piotr Lisowski and Marius Muench of the University of Birmingham, working with Fuzzware's Kristian Covic, built a toolkit called CATAN
- ▪REG AD googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('labrador/thereg/article/desktop/c'); }); They tested 26 devices – 18 smartphones and eight IoT modems – and found that nine exposed an AT command interface to the SIM.
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| Original publisher | The Register |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/08/11/malicious-sims-can-shut-down-phones-steal-files-and-drag-5g-back-to-2g/5285482 |
| Publication time | Tue, 11 Aug 2026 11:37:00 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-11T09:40:44.174Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-11T09:40:44.174Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 7qWGKyXnnjbh · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); security Malicious SIMs can shut down phones, steal files, and drag 5G back to 2G Researchers find standards-compliant functionality can be abused to hijack modems, downgrade connections, and even execute code Carly Page Carly Page Published tue 11 Aug 2026 // 10:37 UTC Researchers have found that a malicious SIM card can tell some phones and cellular-connected devices to leak data, drop to 2G, shut themselves down, or even execute code, all thanks to functionality that's supposed to be…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Register.
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