Chinese hackers suspected of pilfering metadata from 10 cellular networks

It's as if anything using the internet can be tapped into. And any information flowing on the net can be stolen.

And now we are learning that information has been extracted from a hack on ten cell phone carriers. No disclosures yet on just which of the carriers have been affected, but there really aren't enough of them for the typical cell phone user in the affected countries to count on escaping this hack.

An article in Forbes says this. China's Hackers Accused Of 'Mass-Scale Espionage' Attack On Global Cellular Networks:

"The advanced, persistent attack targeting telecommunications providers," the company said, "has been active since at least 2017... The threat actor was attempting to steal all data stored in the active directory, compromising every single username and password in the organization, along with other personally identifiable information, billing data, call detail records, credentials, email servers, geo-location of users, and more."

And note this:

The affected carriers. were in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. None were thought to be in the United States.

So for what it's worth, the U.S. has somehow escaped this one, for now.

More. Wired.com says this about it. A Likely Chinese Hacker Crew Targeted 10 Phone Carriers to Steal Metadata:

Cybereason says that the company found no evidence that the hackers stole the actual content of communications from victims, but the firm's principal security researcher, Amit Serper, argues that the metadata alone—device and SIM identifiers, call records, and which cell tower a phone connected to at any given time—can provide a frighteningly high-resolution picture of a target's life. "That metadata is sometimes more important than the contents of what you're saying," says Serper, who previously worked in Israeli intelligence. "It allows an intelligence service to build a whole picture of you: who you’re talking to, who are your peers and coworkers, when do you wake up and go to bed, where you work, what your route to work looks like. These are valuable pieces of information."

It wasn't so awfully long ago* that Americans were outraged at the NSA for collecting our metadata. But it seems as though the information is out there for the taking by anyone with the skill set.

*Oops. They did it again. NSA Improperly Collected U.S. Phone Records a Second Time.

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1:09 PM 6/26/2019