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Sim card database hack gave US/UK spies access to billions of cellphones

AnaSCI

ADMINISTRATOR
Sep 17, 2003
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American and British spies hacked into the world’s largest sim card manufacturer, stealing encryption keys that potentially gave them access to billions of cellphones around the world, according to documents newly released by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The breach, revealed in documents provided to The Intercept, could have given the NSA and its UK counterpart GCHQ the power to secretly monitor a large portion of the world’s cellular communications, including both voice and data.

Gemalto, the company targeted by the spy agencies, produces 2bn sim cards per year for clients including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon. The Netherlands company operates in 85 countries around the world and provides cards to some 450 wireless network providers globally.

The stolen encryption keys would allow intelligence agencies to monitor mobile communications without the approval or knowledge of telecom companies and foreign governments.

Chris Soghoian, principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union, told the Guardian the hack would allow spies to “put an aerial up on the embassy in Berlin and listen in to anyone’s calls in the area”.

Calls made on 3G and 4G mobile networks are encrypted. But with the keys, which a GCHQ slide described as living “in the phone”, spies could access any communication made on a device unless its owner uses an extra layer of encryption.

NSA and GCHQ hacked into SIM card manufacturers, stealing all the crypto keys https://t.co/pK9LjFXOv5pic.twitter.com/ZlHkh0vQxQ
— Micah Lee (@micahflee) February 19, 2015

Soghoian said the latest Snowden revelations meant that it was difficult for anyone to trust the security of a mobile phone. “It is very unlikely that this is an issue that is going to be fixed anytime soon,” he said. “There is no reason for people to trust AT&T, Verizon or anyone at this point. Their systems are hopelessly insecure.”

“The real value of this is that it allows bulk surveillance of telecoms without anyone getting caught,” Soghoian said of hacks like the one at Gemalto, which he said would allow the spy agencies to target “whoever they wanted”.

“In countries where the government will not cooperate, that’s very useful,” he said. “It’s also very useful in countries where the government would help. Germany would allow spy on a suspected terrorist but not on [Angela] Merkel.”

Previous documents disclosed by the Guardian showed Merkel, the German chancellor, was the target of an NSA spying campaign, a revelation that has soured US-German relations.

Paul Beverly, a Gemalto executive vice-president, told The Intercept that the company was totally oblivious to the penetration of its systems. “I’m disturbed, quite concerned that this has happened,” he said. “The most important thing for me is to understand exactly how this was done, so we can take every measure to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.”

According to the Snowden documents, Gemalto was targeted by the Mobile Handset Exploitation Team (MHET), a unit formed by the NSA and GCHQ in April 2010 to target vulnerabilities in cellphones.

The Intercept reports that in one GCHQ slide, the British intelligence agency boasted it had planted malware – malignant software – on several of Gemalto’s computers, giving GHCQ access to “their entire network”.

The keys were obtained after a clandestine spying operation targeting the email and Facebook accounts of Gemalto employees and other telecom executives. GCHQ operatives singled out key individuals within Gemalto and then hacked their private accounts.

One Gemalto employee in Thailand was identified as “a good place to start” after he was observed sending encrypted files, a move the agents suggested meant he was sending valuable information.