Syniverse, a key company in the mobile industry, was hacked 5 years ago and only realized it at the end of last year. For years, cyber gangsters have even been able to read billions of text messages. But the government of Argentina, the hardware manufacturer Acer and the crypto exchange Coinbase have also admitted to attacks on their IT. Some of the attacks were a long time ago - but they are now fully known.
Syniverse specializes in exchanging messages between different mobile phone providers. This includes SMS, but also meta information such as customer data, routing information and service costs. Only now has it been noticed that the US telecommunications company had already been the victim of a hacker attack five years ago.
Syniverse: Cybergangsters have been in the system for 5 years
The hackers had access to Syniverse's systems for years. The SMS specialist's customers include 95 of the world's top 100 mobile communications providers. 235 carriers were affected by the cyber gangsters' hack. The compromised system called Electronic Data Transfer (EDT) is used by Vodafone, the O2 parent Telefonica, T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon, America Movil and China Mobile, among others. The company processes 740 billion text messages per year.
Cyber attack on Argentina's government
Argentina's government has admitted to being the victim of a hack after a Twitter account called @AnibalLeaks, which has since been blocked, published sensitive personal information on dozens of people, including celebrities. An unknown hacker gained unauthorized access to the National Register of Persons (Renaper) using a stolen password. The extent of the damage is currently unclear. The Argentine government claims only a few dozen files were stolen. However, the hacker himself claims to be in possession of the complete database and threatens to publish it.
Attack on Acer: 60 GB of data stolen
The Taiwanese hardware manufacturer Acer has again fallen victim to hacker attacks by cyber gangsters. First, Acer servers in India were hacked and 60 GB of customer and company data was stolen. Subsequently, employee data was stolen from Acer servers in Taiwan. Affected customers were informed in India, according to Acer there were no significant effects on business operations. The customer data was offered for sale online.
Crypto exchange Coinbase: 6.000 customers were robbed
According to crypto exchange Coinbase, cyber gangsters have stolen the digital currencies of 6.000 Coinbase customers. Between March and May 20, 2021, the attackers exploited a vulnerability that allowed them to bypass the company's two-factor authentication. In addition, the hackers must have had access to the victims' email accounts. It is assumed that this data got into the hands of the attackers with the help of phishing campaigns. With around 68 million users, Coinbase is the second largest crypto exchange in the world. After the attack became known, Coinbase corrected the “SMS account recovery logs” to prevent further bypassing of SMS two-factor authentication. In addition to the stolen digital currencies, the personal data of those affected was also disclosed, including name, e-mail address, address, date of birth, IP addresses, transaction history and account balance and existing credit balance of the customers.
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Founded in 1993 as a system house, QGroup GmbH has also established itself as a manufacturer of (high) security products since 2000. As a competence center for high availability and IT security, the Frankfurt company today offers multifactor authentication solutions with biometrics and multilevel security appliances, creation and implementation of holistic security concepts, security audits and penetration tests as well as multilevel security and trusted computing under the label QGroup Security. Concepts.