#HITB2017AMS
In 2005 an incredible story called the ‘Athens Affair’ exposed an advanced telco hack obviously carried out by a state actor. The sophistication of the attack came as a huge surprise in a pre-Snowden world. To this day the case was never solved, even though it involved phone tapping of government officials and resulted in the suspicious death of a key witness. Whoever did this was never heard from again. Until now.
During a routine security audit of a mobile network operator, suspicious activity was detected that led to the observation of a live session of what is believed to be the same offensive team that hacked the Vodafone network in Greece in 2004-2005.
This presentation will present the findings of this investigation, the methodologies used by the attacker, some of the tools involved, the protocols used by their C&C, and other interesting elements gathered from forensic analysis.
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SVC member emx has been speaking about security issues related to telecommunications systems for about 20 years. Most of his public talks about telco security have been dismissively ignored by network operators yet he continues his crusade to educate them about the growing threats faced by their critical infrastructures upon which our lives increasingly depend.
Emmanuel started working in the mobile telecommunications industry in the early 90′s while following an advanced late-night curriculum in in-band signalling. Distressed by the apparent death of phreaking due to the introduction of the SS7 out-of-band signalling, he embarked on a decade-long quest to return this early form of telephone hacking to its former glory. In 2001 he presented the first-ever public speech about GSM security at the Black Hat briefings in Hong Kong and Singapore, followed by a streams of other presentations on that topic at major security events across Europe and Asia. In 2002 co-founded TSTF with Philippe Langlois to conduct security research on telecommunications systems and assisting mobile operators in securing their infrastructure, a Sisyphean effort in the complex and ever-changing world of mobile telecom carriers.