As promised, Gemalto held a press conference today to respond to a report that they were hacked by U.K. and U.S. intelligence types and encryption codes that would let them spy on smartphone users were stolen. Now News.com has a pretty comprehensive report. But it can be summed up like this:
“The attacks against Gemalto only breached its office networks and could not have resulted in a massive theft of SIM encryption keys,” Gemalto said in a statement at a press conference held in response to a report in the Intercept alleging a massive theft by the US National Security Agency and UK Government Communications Headquarters. The report said millions of SIM card encryption keys had been stolen through the joint NSA and GCHQ operation.
Gemalto then lays out why this is the case. And they also let the world know that 2G networks would be the ones under threat. Both 3G and 4G networks are apparently safe. But the core message is this: There’s nothing to see here. Move along.
Though, they did let this cat out of the bag:
However, Gemalto said, it appears that other SIM card manufacturers were targeted, so privacy and security concerns can’t be dispelled. For example, the spy agency documents pointed to 300,000 keys stolen from a Somali carrier that isn’t a Gemalto customer. Indeed, that’s the case for four of the 12 carriers identified in the documents, Gemalto said.
Lovely. Clearly this story isn’t over and neither is the concern that this will generate.
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This entry was posted on February 25, 2015 at 1:57 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Hacked, UK, US. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Gemalto To Planet Earth: You Have Nothing To Worry About
As promised, Gemalto held a press conference today to respond to a report that they were hacked by U.K. and U.S. intelligence types and encryption codes that would let them spy on smartphone users were stolen. Now News.com has a pretty comprehensive report. But it can be summed up like this:
“The attacks against Gemalto only breached its office networks and could not have resulted in a massive theft of SIM encryption keys,” Gemalto said in a statement at a press conference held in response to a report in the Intercept alleging a massive theft by the US National Security Agency and UK Government Communications Headquarters. The report said millions of SIM card encryption keys had been stolen through the joint NSA and GCHQ operation.
Gemalto then lays out why this is the case. And they also let the world know that 2G networks would be the ones under threat. Both 3G and 4G networks are apparently safe. But the core message is this: There’s nothing to see here. Move along.
Though, they did let this cat out of the bag:
However, Gemalto said, it appears that other SIM card manufacturers were targeted, so privacy and security concerns can’t be dispelled. For example, the spy agency documents pointed to 300,000 keys stolen from a Somali carrier that isn’t a Gemalto customer. Indeed, that’s the case for four of the 12 carriers identified in the documents, Gemalto said.
Lovely. Clearly this story isn’t over and neither is the concern that this will generate.
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This entry was posted on February 25, 2015 at 1:57 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Hacked, UK, US. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.