Over a month ago BBB reported about Hilton’s Sidekick II being hacked. We don’t understand why it is only now becoming a big story but we suspect that it has something to do with the girl-on-girl topless action photos.

Celebrity cell hackings would cause one to think that people would become more aware of their wireless security. Alas, we all know that you did nothing. Nothing other than murmur “this won’t happen to me” while drooling over Hilton’s topless photos.

Dave Nardoni at First Response Consulting provided a handy summary of one of the primary ways your cellphone can get hacked:

If you heard about Paris Hilton or Vin Diesel cell phone getting hack this weekend, they are not alone as it can happen to anyone.

The Hack-
Hackers are using website such as http://www.covertcall.com (5 free tries) and others to call a victims cell phone using the victims “caller id”.  This is done via the website, the hacker will enter their cell number and the victim’s cell and called id number.  The cell/pcs provider (Sprint/Nextel/T-mobile) will see the caller id and things [sic] it is the victim calling from his own cell phone.  The cell provider then sends the hacker’s call into the victim’s voicemail.  Now the hacker can listen to voicemail, get group address books, and change passwords*

How to Prevent-
To prevent this hack, you need to make sure your voicemail is set-up to ask for a password when you dial from you cell phone.  This feature is usually called “Skip-Passcode”.

Make sure you have a password setup to access your voicemail.