The Wakeup call to choose secure communication platforms
Syniverse is a telecom company which has roughly 1,250 corporate customers across 200 countries, including a vast majority of the world’s mobile carriers, such as AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Vodafone, China Mobile, Airtel, Telefónica, and América Móvil. The company provides services which are used to connect the networks of different mobile carriers and enable the transmission of data between them. Consequently, Syniverse enables billions of transactions, conversations and connections every day.
Before Syniverse became a publicly traded company, a “SEC filing” was done as per the regulations. In the filing, the company admitted discovering a data breach in May 2021. Further investigation revealed that an unknown threat actor had unauthorized access to its ecosystems since May 2016. Further investigation revealed that the threat actor was able to access 5 years of databases within their network which included conversations by customers worldwide through their cellular connection and service facility.
After the news about this unknown threat actor came up in the public, Syniverse company gave a follow up statement to Security Week, a cyber security news and analysis site. In the statement, they mentioned that “All EDT (Electronic Data Transfer) customers have had their credentials reset or inactivated, even if their credentials were not impacted by the incident. We have communicated directly with our customers regarding this matter and have concluded that no additional action is required.”
Thus it is evident that such unauthorized access to a chunk of customer data from the largest telecom company will impact the privacy and security of its widespread global customers. In times of ever increasing sophistication in technology, many threat actors come into the picture for various financial, political and other reasons. No matter how organized their services are or how rigid their security systems are configured, until and unless vulnerabilities in our technology comes down to an absolute zero and as long as human errors are bound to happen, no technology is completely safe from a future compromise.
As privacy and security is our utmost priority in the age of technology, we believe it is time we shift our communication platforms to more secure options. In the era of end-to-end encryption technology in many secure communication applications, it would be an act of jeopardizing our own privacy if we still constantly rely on basic cellular communication methods. Choosing to communicate from secure applications such as Signal, Wire, WhatsApp and etc, not only saves our cost, but moreover it provides us the privacy of end-to-end encryption technology which are not possible in the traditional setup of cellular communication like we have always done from the past.
