cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/26768429
America’s aging infrastructure seems to be the culprit.
Haven’t people been warning for years china was selling telecom backbone equipment at a loss. Probably so they would have their equipment with their backdoors in most of the world.
That stuff has been removed from major telco networks. This was the Lawful Intercept functionality being hacked on some sort of device.
Threat actors used an existing backdoor in a communications system to intercept communications in that system? Color me whatever the opposite of “shocked” is. This is exactly the problem which was brought up by security researchers when the NSA was asking for a frontdoor which would let them break encryption. Thankfully, we held the line in that battle of the Crypto Wars. But, the war never ends and we need to make sure folks remember this clusterfuck the next time the NSA starts pushing to break encryption.