State-sponsored hackers compromise cellular networks, steal information about critical individuals

As cyber offensives of Beijing undergo increasing scrutiny, one fresh report states hackers, believably receiving Chinese government's backing, recently, hacked into cellular networks belonging to ten-or-more worldwide carriers to steal end-users' whereabouts, call logs as also text-messaging contents.

Investigators working in Cybereason an U.S.-Israeli cyber company stated June 25 that the hackers hijacked organizations within over thirty countries while targeted for gathering info regarding people within politics, law enforcement and government.

According to chief executive Lior Div at Cybereason, the attackers as well utilized tools associated with other assaults, which USA along with its allies in the West believed to arise from Beijing. www.reuters.com posted this, June 25, 2019.

On an occasion later Div depicted the breach's breakdown in detail at one conference on cyber-security which was held at Tel Aviv during a session where cyber intelligence division heads of Britain and USA along with the Mossad spy agency head of Israel also spoke.

The assault, which Cybereason the security company named Operation Soft Cell, was responsible for exfiltrating several hundred GBs of information. According to the company, there was complete hold over the hijacked networks in the hands of the hackers who could've without difficulty derailed the cellular networks in their entirety.

Lead security researcher Amit Serper with Cybereason who's also the report's author says cellular service has become an extremely important infrastructure. He's worried about the volume of access like that of the complete network the cyber-attackers have acquired. Therefore, at worse, they can sabotage the networks and maybe even shut them down wholly, Serper laments. www.csoonline.com posted this, June 25, 2019.

According to Serper, the attack in discussion employed techniques and procedures linked to APT 10, notably one web shell for filching credentials as well as certain RAT (remote access tool) . www.wsj.com posted this, June 24, 2019.

Also named Cloudhopper, APT 10, reportedly, receives the China government's backing as evident from its chasing data down history. Nation-state syndicates similar as APT 10 usually work in a covert manner while practice intelligence gathering, as opposed to organized crime gangs, which pilfer networks or destabilize websites for collecting credit card or bank account data.

» SPAMfighter News - 7/1/2019