By: Staff Writer
December 18, 2020
China has been caught spying on Americans travelling through the Caribbean claims a security analyst, who has been tracking decades long cyber security issues in the region.
Gary Miller, a former vice president of network security at California-based analytics company Mobileum, told UK The Guardian he had amassed evidence of espionage conducted via “decades-old vulnerabilities” in the global telecommunications system.
Miller, who has spent years analysing mobile threat intelligence reports and observations of signalling traffic between foreign and US mobile operators, said in some cases China appeared to have used networks in the Caribbean to conduct its surveillance.
At the heart of this surveillance, is the use of the (Signalling System 7) rotocols still in use in many of the Caribbean jurisdictions. Many of the international mobile phone carriers have switched to the SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) systems some decades ago, but Caribbean infrastructure has not kept pace.
In a nutshell, the SIP infrastructure makes the SS7 infrastructure look like mobile touch-screen handsets to that of antiquated rotary phones, or the use of the telegram to that of a push button telephone.
The SS7 is a set of telephony signalling protocols developed in 1975, which is used to set up and tear down telephone calls in most parts of the world-wide public switched telephone, while the SIP is a signalling protocol used for initiating, maintaining, and terminating real-time sessions that include voice, video and messaging applications.
Mr Miller said the two networks most hacked and taken advantage of by China through their state run telephone company, China Unicom, are the Barbados based Flow and The Bahamas based BTC, both owned by Cable and Wireless Systems.
BTC responded to these allegations in a brief statement on the company’s website which reads: “Across all the markets where Cable & Wireless Communications (CWC) operates, including The Bahamas, we continuously monitor our networks and have robust security policies and protocols in place to protect the data of our customers. We take our commitment to data protection seriously and are carefully reviewing the information”
Flow in Barnados has not responded to these allegations up to this article running.
The Chinese Embassy in The Bahamas on the other hand has condemned the allegations claiming it to be nothing more than dirty tricks by the US government in their attempt to sully the international acclaim and reputation of Chinese telecommunications firms.
Mr Miller told the Guardian, “U.S. Government agencies and Congress have been aware of public mobile network vulnerabilities for years,” he said. “Security recommendations made by our government have not been followed and are not sufficient to stop attackers.”
He added: “No one in the industry wants the public to know the severity of ongoing surveillance attacks. I want the public to know about it.”
In The Bahamas less than 10 years back the U.S. Government itself was accused of spying on all persons in The Bahamas, including American citizens on vacation, under the project “Mystic” where the U.S. drug enforcement agency and FBI used telecommunications systems in the country to listen in to suspected drug traffickers and those they presumed to be involved in international terrorism. The programme Mystic would not have come to light if it were not for the now wanted former National Security Agency employee, Edward Snowden, who leaked the details about the surveillance programme to the media back in 2014.
Overall, Miller said he believed tens of thousands of US mobile users were affected by the alleged attacks emanating from China from 2018 to 2020.
“Once you get into the tens of thousands, the attacks qualify as mass surveillance, which is primarily for intelligence collection and not necessarily targeting high-profile targets. It might be that there are locations of interest, and these occur primarily while people are abroad,” Miller said. In other words, Miller said he believed the messages were indicative of surveillance of mass movement patterns and communication of US travellers.
Miller also found what he called unique cases in which the same mobile phone users who appear to have been targeted via China Unicom also appear to have been targeted simultaneously through two Caribbean operators: Cable & Wireless Communications (Flow) in Barbados and Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BTC).