Billions of messages in nature left gaps for 5 years due to fault

Be careful, some of your messages may be turned off completely at this time. Syniverse, a company that provides services to multiple operators around the world including AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, has just disclosed the matter indirectly. a report Reported, filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Motherboard.

This document states that a “The unidentified person or organization had repeatedly obtained unauthorized access to the database in their network. “ The company discovered this breach in its security systems in May 2021. Problem: This vulnerability began to be exploited by hackers five years ago in May 2016.

During these five years, they were able to get their hands on a lot of sensitive data passing through Syniverse, including millions or even billions of messages from people around the world. The company sends over 740 billion SMS from one operator to another, which represents a huge amount of data.

A former Syniverse employee revealed that this data can collect a lot of metadata such as phone numbers, user locations, and the length and cost of calls or messages. The database that hackers would have created after this breach “Essentially includes sensitive information such as call records, data usage records, text messages, etc.” “, explains the source.

The problem is that access to these messages undermines two-factor authentication, which is based on sending an SMS. “Syniverse hack will make it easier to access Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and all other types of accounts”, explains security researcher Carsten Knohl, who has already qualified in the matter “The Global Privacy Disaster.”