Company That Routes Billions of Text Messages Quietly Says It Was Hacked 9-12 minutes
Screen Shot 2021-02-24 at 3 Hacking. Disinformation. Surveillance. CYBER is Motherboard's podcast and reporting on the dark underbelly of the internet. A company that is a critical part of the global telecommunications infrastructure used by AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and several others around the world such as Vodafone and China Mobile, quietly disclosed that hackers were inside its systems for years, impacting more than 200 of its clients and potentially millions of cellphone users worldwide. The company, Syniverse, revealed in a filing dated September 27 with the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission that an unknown "individual or organization gained unauthorized access to databases within its network on several occasions, and that login information allowing access to or from its Electronic Data Transfer (EDT) environment was compromised for approximately 235 of its customers." A former Syniverse employee who worked on the EDT systems told Motherboard that those systems have information on all types of call records. Syniverse repeatedly declined to answer specific questions from Motherboard about the scale of the breach and what specific data was affected, but according to a person who works at a telephone carrier, whoever hacked Syniverse could have had access to metadata such as length and cost, caller and receiver's numbers, the location of the parties in the call, as well as the content of SMS text messages. "Syniverse is a common exchange hub for carriers around the world passing billing info back and forth to each other," the source, who asked to remain anonymous as they were not authorized to talk to the press, told Motherboard. "So it inevitably carries sensitive info like call records, data usage records, text messages, etc. [...] The thing is—I don’t know exactly what was being exchanged in that environment. One would have to imagine though it easily could be customer records and [personal identifying information] given that Syniverse exchanges call records and other billing details between carriers." The company wrote that it discovered the breach in May 2021, but that the hack began in May of 2016. < - > https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xpm8/company-that-routes-billions-of-text-messages-quietly-says-it-was-hacked -- Iw mailing list [email protected] http://sticklist.org/mailman/listinfo/iw_sticklist.org
