20210102 Überwachung über Mobilfunknetze

400 Attacks per 100.000 User

Such a high “incidence value” should actually trigger strong reactions from the state power - but no, it is not about Corona but the monitoring of movement profiles of cell phones. At the remote Chaos Communication Congress (rC3), security researcher Cathal Mc Daid reported on the fight against secret surveillance.

He complains that the mobile network operators thought themselves safe for years. In the days of GSM and UMTS it was assumed that only “authorized companies” had the ability and the know-how to penetrate the networks. With the SS7 cellular protocol, any kind of abuse up to the interception of SMS and the rerouting of calls was possible.

The successor version of the SS7 protocol for 4G networks called Diameter was not much better either. It only got a little more secure with the introduction of AdaptiveMobile Security. This did not make attacks impossible, they just had to be carried out more skillfully.

The Simjacker attack only became known last year, and it actually does not interfere with the cell phone system: a specially prepared SMS could instruct a victim's cell phone to send its own location back to the attacker. And that happens without this being displayed anywhere on the mobile phone, because the SIM card processes and answers such inquiries on its own.

After it became known, the number of such attacks fell, but at one provider the security researcher still counted 400 attacks per 100,000 customers within a year. Before that, the number is said to have been even 1300 queries per 100,000 customers. This is a clear indication that this method has been used by “certain services” for continuous monitoring.

We would also suspect that there was also such an intention when programming this “feature” in the SIM cards. Such a code did not burn itself into the cards ...
In this context, we remind you of the efforts to define the Elliptic Curve Random Generator 2007 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as the standard for wireless encryption. ECRG has been used for encryption in mobile communications for many years and can be cracked in seconds!

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