How easy is it for someone to hack into your cordless phone conversations?

[Baitball Blogger]

What does it take to make them safe?

[Baitball Blogger]

2. Which are the most reliable?

Which ones are the least?

[TreasonousBastard]

3. Scanners for the bands cordless phones use...

now are not readily available, so your neighbor's kid probably won't be listening to you talking to your bookie.

But, if your spouse really, really doesn't trust you, or you are under surveillance for some reason, such scanners are not that tough to find. At any rate, most phones are only good for a hundred feet or so, so only close neighbors or spies hiding under a bush in the front yard can eavesdrop.

For the truly paranoid, or those with serious secrets to keep, there exist cordless phones that encrypt the conversation between the headset and the base to make it much tougher to eavesdrop.

[noamnety]

4. I listened in on a scanner once

and was shocked at the conversations people were having out in the open. One guy was doing his mortgage application and gave out every last bit of personal information he could on himself including bank numbers and his social security number, and when he was done, ran through the same info on his fiance. I could have stolen their entire identities with basically no effort and had a heck of a time on their dime.

[Baitball Blogger]

5. Did you hack in on a cordless or a cellphone?

[noamnety]

6. oh, good point.

That was old cell phones. And the husband who was involved in that and knows more than me is clarifying that it was first gen phones, now they're digital mainly so it's not so ridiculously easy, but when they were analog you could just surf their conversations.

[revolution breeze]

9. Back in the 80s when hubby was a teen

he used to listen to all the neighbors on cordless phones on a regular scanner. He joined the Navy and put this skill to use as a Radioman. He says phones are much more secure today.

[HopeHoops]

10. Originally very easy. Not so much anymore.

The first one I got was a Motorola "Star Trek communicator" that had a scramble feature. There was a button you could hold down to hear the scrambled signal. It didn't really serve any purpose other than to convince users that it was actually doing some scrambling there, but it was sort of cool.

[littlewolf]

11. a cordless phone could be listened to on a baby monitor ....

not sure about today .... but 7 years ago .... my neighbor told me
you heard a phone call I had gotten the night before ... I switched
to corded phones and either use my cell ...or a corded phone ...