Unsecured Pager Networks

Australian hospitals and emergency services are still divulging sensitive patient details in 2023! 🤦

  • Full name
  • Date of birth
  • Residential address
  • Phone
  • Medical details

It is easy to receive pager messages.

Receiving radio pager messages is a bit like turning on an FM radio in a car. Anyone can listen in.

Pager messages can be received using a TV tuner connected to a computer.

For example:
PagerMon: A browser based app for displaying pager messages from multimon-ng

Be careful though!

Teenagers keep getting raided by Police.

It seems like every few years a teenager gets raided by Police for setting up a Raspberry Pi running PagerMon with an RTLSDR TV tuner and publishing sensitive patient details online.

Do not publish sensitive patient details online!

Here are some recent incidents:
Tasmania Police called in after ambulance patient details published online

WA Health information so insecure it was published for months by teenage ‘script kiddie’

What is the solution?

STOP sharing sensitive patient details over unsecured radio pager networks.

Use end-to-end encrypted communication over the internet instead!