Hacked SMS routing company for major US carriers

[Teacher]

Syniverse, which provides services to most of the major telecom operators in the United States, reported a hack. Hackers infiltrated the company's network five years ago and accessed its databases, compromising the credentials of hundreds of customers.

Syniverse provides text messaging and routing services to over 300 mobile operators, including giants such as Vodafone, AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, America Movil, Telefonica, and China Mobile. The company is so big that it boasts on its official website that its clients are "almost all mobile operators, the world's largest banks, the world's largest technology companies." According to official statistics, the Syniverse infrastructure processes more than 740 billion messages annually, providing communication between mobile network operators.

The documents sold by the Commission on the Securities and Exchange Commission, reported that an unauthorized third party has penetrated into Syniverse network and has repeatedly appealed to the company's data bases. The leak was discovered in May 2021, and then an investigation was launched, which revealed that hackers had infiltrated the Syniverse network back in 2016.

For five years, hackers retained access to Syniverse's internal databases and compromised the Electronic Data Transfer (EDT) login credentials of approximately 235 customers.

“All EDT clients were notified of the incident and their credentials were reset or deactivated, even if they were not affected by the incident. All clients whose credentials were affected were notified of this circumstance, ”assures Syniverse.

At the same time, the company notes that the investigation did not reveal any attempts to disrupt its work or profit from hacking. Unfortunately, the company does not rule out the possibility of data theft, which could affect its business, employees, customers, suppliers and sellers, and may also be used for cyberattacks in the future.

Given the role of Syniverse in the work of mobile operators, it is easy to understand what data hackers could access, this is data about the sources of messages, their destination, time stamps, location, and possibly even the content of the SMS itself.

The company does not disclose any data other than those presented in the report for the authorities, citing an ongoing investigation.

“Given the confidential nature of our customer relationship and pending law enforcement investigations, we are not making further public statements on this matter,” says Syniverse.

The Vice Motherboard quoted an anonymous person working for a telecom operator. The source said that Syniverse hackers could have access to metadata, including the length and cost of messages, information about subscribers and their numbers, location, and the content of text messages.

“Syniverse is a unified exchange hub for operators around the world, transmitting billing information to each other,” says the source. “So it inevitably contains sensitive information, including call records, data usage records, text messages and so on [...] The thing is, I don't know what exactly they were exchanging in this environment. It's easy to imagine that it could have been customer records and [personal identification information]. "