Security experts have known for over 15 years that the protocol is vulnerable in several ways. In 2008, security researcher Tobias Engel demonstrated that ss 7 could be used to identify a user’s location. In 2014, German researchers went one step further, demonstrating that it could also be used to listen in on calls or record and store voice and text data. Attackers could forward the data to themselves or, if they were close to the phone, hover over it and tell the system to give them the decryption key. Surveillance companies and spy agencies had known about the problem for much longer. Many were taking advantage of it.
In April 2014, Russian hackers exploited ss 7 to locate and spy on Ukrainian politicians. In 2017, a German telecommunications company acknowledged that attackers had stolen money from customers by intercepting SMS authentication codes sent by banks. In 2018, an Israeli surveillance company used a mobile operator in the Channel industry email list Islands, a British territory, to gain access to ss 7 and thus users around the world.
been used to track an Emirati princess who was kidnapped and returned to the UAE in 2018. And in 2022, Cathal McDaid of Enea, a Swedish telecommunications and cybersecurity firm, assessed that Russian hackers had long been tracking and intercepting Russian dissidents abroad by the same means.
Beginning in 2014, Chinese hackers stole massive amounts of data from the Office of Personnel Management, the government agency that runs the U.S. federal civil service. The most sensitive data were security clearance records, which contain highly personal details. But phone numbers were also stolen. According to semi-redacted slides released by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. officials noticed “abnormal traffic on SS 7” that summer, which they believed was related to the breach.