Company That Handles Billions Of Text Messages Quietly Admits It Was Hacked Years Ago

Company That Handles Billions Of Text Messages Quietly Admits It Was Hacked Years Ago

3 years ago
Anonymous $BH0TGXkyPe

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20211004/09071947695/company-that-handles-billions-text-messages-quietly-admits-it-was-hacked-years-ago.shtml

We've noted for a long time that the wireless industry is prone to being fairly lax on security and consumer privacy. One example is the recent rabbit hole of a scandal related to the industry's treatment of user location data, which carriers have long sold to a wide array of middlemen without much thought as to how this data could be (and routinely is) abused. Another example is the industry's refusal to address the longstanding flaws in Signaling System 7 (SS7, or Common Channel Signaling System 7 in the US), a series of protocols hackers can exploit to track user location, dodge encryption, and even record private conversations.

Now this week, a wireless industry middleman that handles billions of texts every year has acknowledged its security isn't much to write home about either. A company by the name of Syniverse revealed that it was the target of a major attack in a September SEC filing, first noted by Motherboard. The filing reveals that an "individual or organization" gained unauthorized access to the company's databases "on several occasions." That in turn provided the intruder repeated access to the company's Electronic Data Transfer (EDT) environment compromising 235 of its corporate telecom clients.