Vodafone Greece "hacked" - is Vodafone UK safe ?
The scandal unfolding in Greece, reported by the Independent over the revelations that politicians mobile phones, including those of the Greek prime minister etc. had been intercepted by Vodafone, before and after the 2004 Olympic Games.
Is the Vodafone mobile phone network similarly vulnerable here in the United Kingdom ?
Some more details in this AFP report via Alan Mather e-government@large
The eavesdropping system operated through the local Vodafone mobile service, and was discovered when the company began an investigation into customer complaints involving lost text messages.The inquest discovered that an illegal software code had been introduced to activate a Vodafone sub-system permitting call interception. This code had been entered without Vodafone’s knowledge, the government said.
In addition to the prime minister, four top ministers also had their cellphones tapped, as did European Union environment commissioner Stavros Dimas and Athens Mayor Dora Bakoyannis, among others.
Other targets included a cellphone belonging to the US embassy, and phones used by several ministries and the general staff of the Greek Navy.
In a statement issued on Thursday evening, Vodafone Greece admitted it had removed the spyware before informing the government.
Yesterday, it added that copies of the software were retained, and that related evidence had been submitted to the authorities.
The Greek defence ministry, which saw the cellphones of most of its top brass compromised, insisted that “all conversations pertaining to matters of national security are always conducted on encrypted networks”.Asked about the issue on Thursday, government spokesman Roussopoulos likewise deemed that the tapping had caused “no damage” to Greece’s national interests.
"The prime minister and the cabinet members use encrypted phones,” he said.
Did Vodafone Greece disabling of the "conference call" style mobile phone interception to the alleged "14 to 15" pre-paid mobile phone handsets even before they informed the Greek Government, actually let the culprits slip away undetected ?
There should have been a chance for the Greek authorities to triangulate the locations of these handsets, much more accurately than to the nearest 4 cell phone transmitters,
It should be noted that the pre-paid phone cards used operated on aerials located in Lycabettus, Mavili Square, Pyrgos Athinon and Lefkos Stavros clinic,
The foreign embassies, including those of the United Kingdom and the United States, the Greek Parliament and the Hellenic Ministry of Defence are all situated close to each other in central Athens at the base of the Acropolis hill.
The list of 44 surveillance targets (some of whom had more than one Vodafone phone) also includes some Arabic businessmen , as well as the Governemnt politicans, opposition politicians and military personnel.
The Sunday Times also reports the suspicious timing of the suicide of a key Vodafone employee:
As part of the government’s investigation into the scandal, the suicide of Kostas Tsalikidis, 39, Vodafone Greece’s head of network design, is being re-examined by police.Tsalikidis was found hanged in his Athens flat on the morning of March 9, 2005, two days after the ghost program had been discovered and shut down by George Koronias, the Vodafone general manager, and a day before the prime minister’s office was informed.
Even specially extra encrypted mobile phones using the Mobile Phone networks still yield important Communications Traffic Data i.e. which phone number is calling or receiving or sending SMS messages to which other one, at which time. The mobile phone Cell Location Data is independent of the phone handsest to handset encrypted tunnels, and so would also be available to a "hacker" or "intelligence agency" via a compromised mobile phone network, such as the one reported above.
Together with the Portuguese scandal,which also has seen the release of Communications Traffic Data records of many politicians, as part of the investigation into the Casa Pia child abuse ringl, has implications for the UK government's current dithering over the "Wilson Doctrine"
Comments
The scandal does seem to be under a lot of investigation in Greece at the moment.
The worrying thing for us in the UK or elsewhere, is that it is still unclear if the activation of the Ericsson developed wiretapping / conference call diversion software was via a remote exploit or whether it needed a priviliged insider to install and activate it. Are our mobile phone networks also vulnerable to this sort of illegal activity ?
http://news.ert.gr/en/newsDetails.asp?ID=14957
Posted by: wtwu | February 8, 2006 3:58 PM
dear COSTAS GEORGOPOULOS, we went to the same high school. I want to speak with you for Kostas Tsalikidis. I dont Know if you remerber me. Please call me if it is possible to 0030 6978 778999 or write to (iasonasvel@yahoo.com)
I am waiting. Thanks.
Posted by: Panos Toumasis | February 9, 2006 1:48 PM
http://www.comverse.com/customers/Global.htm
...did you say safe?
Posted by: dos | February 10, 2006 3:32 AM
@ dos - are we safe from the same Ericsson software / hardware in common use worldwide ?
What are you implying about Comverse ?
Here in the UK , we have our own potential scandal involving telephone / mobile phone / internet / postal Interception and Communications Traffic Data regarding our Members of Parliament , who are supposed to be immune from that sort of thing under the "Wilson Doctrine", which seems to be under review now after operating for 40 years.
Posted by: wtwu | February 10, 2006 3:48 AM
Today in the UK my partner's sister phoned us on land line to ask about a conversation that she had overheard on her land line from my prepaid vodafone mobile. My mobile was switched ON with keypad LOCKED, I made or received NO CALLS. Within 1 hour the message came about my conversation(NOT on phone) from 160 miles away. Now that is SCARY.
Posted by: Derek J Egan | February 11, 2006 5:05 PM
The Ericsson AXE telecomms switch is common throughout the UK Mobile Phone Networks, and so any poyential remote compromises are of extreme concern to our privacy and security here in the UK.
The Ericsson Interception Management System manual etc. is available at
http://www.quintessenz.org/cgi-bin/index?id=000100002344
and at
http://cryptome.org/ericsson-ims.htm
It shows what is possible, and what would require extra expenditure, to comply with the categories of data under the Home Office's RIPA Voluntary (for now) Code of Practice, and the (different) European Union Directive Communications Traffic Data Retention plans.
Posted by: wtwu | February 13, 2006 9:24 AM
Tapping is not anything new. Its been going on for many years via Greece's fixed lines.CIA and other intelligent agencies have been doing this for years. I think its the way of life today to catch corrupt politicians and terrorists. If someone is corrupt or a terrorist, we should all know about it.!
Posted by: Tony | February 16, 2006 10:35 PM
The problem with Vodafone was that the company had not safeguard its security encryption software as this is being examined now.
Posted by: Aris Pallis | February 20, 2006 5:54 AM
The telco engineering job no longer seems to be what it used to. I must confess that there has been a bit of a co-incidence with some of the elements of this article.
1) Running through that strictly confidential IMS_USER_MANUAL is a picture of a GUI making reference to a machine (prsm07) that I christened and setup for Ericsson 10 years ago! How did that document end up on the internet?
2) In early 2006 I was talking to Bill Zikou about transferring to Ericsson Athens when his face appeared on local TV (delayed N.E.T. TV played in Australia) almost spraying my morning coffee (just like the movies)!
3) I have worked with Ericsson twice, the first time I ended it in 1998 when coming back from holidays to discover that one of our staff members had been knocked off (strangled to death)!
The first time I worked with Ericsson in 1997 it was a very process and procedure driven organisation with copious amounts of documentation to describe pretty much everything. In Australia, Ericsson had a CMM level of 2. During this period the manufacturing of phones and circuit boards became too expensive forcing the local factories to be closed and work either outsourced or sent to China, however software and services remained strong. My induction took roughly 2 months.
The second time I worked with Ericsson in 2006 I saw people with old skills trying to relive the old ways and blend in with the furniture. While I was away from Ericsson I modernised my skills (AGILE, SOA, opensource, etc). The new Ericsson was using Windows 2000 server on low specification PCs to do software development. And it gets worse – staff were bringing in their personal copies of windows 2003 server to meet 3PP requirements just to move forward. I could not convince Ericsson to use Linux, I struggled to introduce VMWARE (it ran like a dog), and was forced to use old unsupported Sun Microsystems hardware – including the original IMS development machine (which I reformatted of course). The only induction for new staff was to throw them in the deep end.
If I were to give Ericsson a CMM rating it would be minus five. Perhaps I am a bit hard as the cost of supporting the old way is now too expensive. However these issues were not technical but more managerial as other aspects besides software development were lacking. For example, security was explained to us but its practice was often ignored with an I-don't want-to-know-about-it attitude by managers. This led to practices like developers setting up IP tunnels over the internet between two Ericsson buildings to access test equipment that was not allowed to be connected to the local area network - sometimes we found the test servers had been hacked and filled with pornographic content. Once when working back late (and the only time I worked through the entire night) in a supposedly secured Ericsson building I could hear someone violently bashing the door on the floor I worked on (level 37) at 3am in the morning. I was very fortunate he didn't get through the last line of defence and that he did not hide in the toilets which were outside. I could not report this to anyone – was someone going to knock me off that night? The final confirmation of this apathy came from someone I know who does not work in IT (he works in law enforcement) told me that he found an Ericsson pass that looked recent which he actually bothered to take to Ericsson direct and in his words "they didn’t even seem to care".
In the Human Resources aspect I saw individuals with extremely lucrative contracts, I saw people who literally did nothing, I saw bullying, personal abuse, and a huge staff turnaround. My line manager as it turned out was friends with the underworld owner of the largest brothel in Australia and boasted about having flown on his private jet. I found it rather unusual that he send his secretary to request my username and password before I left which was against Ericsson policy which he knew – of course I refused. I thought all this was very un-Ericsson until I came across The Ericsson Group website which exposes a significant amount of corruption in the company.
This dysfunction in Ericsson I feel is causing the vulnerable weakness to security. This dysfunction was deliberately done as it allowed certain senior players to manoeuvre themselves for building stronger personal empires. Ericsson I found is very unlike the old days, even Bill Zikou who is now CEO of Ericsson Australia remarked on how much better organised they were in his region in Europe. A clue to who was responsible for creating this dysfunction in Ericsson Australia can be found in a quote used by our technically challenged (no formal engineering qualifications) but very street smart Oracle DBA who kept on surviving even after introducing so many show stoppers and even after crashing the customers live mobile phone network service – he used to say quite regularly and loudly "I'm not Jewish but I wish I was". Definitely not a normal place to work in, but if you think of the rewards of taking control of systems that allow you to listen in to big business and politics then you begin to attract a different breed of worker.
Posted by: e-engineer | February 13, 2008 1:18 AM
@ e-engineer - thanks for your interesting comments. Is Ericsson better or worse than their commercial rivals ?
From our experience certain telecommunications and companies do not enforce a strict air gap between their test and development systems and their core business production systems as they should.
Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Scott Adams the satirical cartoonist creator of Dilbert used to work in a Pacific Bell cubicle farm.
Posted by: wtwu | February 13, 2008 1:55 PM