Telecom giant Syniverse secretly revealed to the Securities and Exchange Commission last week that attackers have been inside its systems over the past five years, impacting hundreds of business clients and potentially millions of users globally.
Syniverse handles nearly 740 billion text messages every year, and some of its customers include major firms such as Airtel, China Mobile, AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone, and T-Mobile.
“The world’s largest companies and nearly all mobile carriers rely on Syniverse’s global network to seamlessly bridge mobile ecosystems and securely transmit data, enabling billions of transactions, conversations, and connections [daily],” Syniverse wrote in a recent press release.
Syniverse disclosed in a filing on September 27 with the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission that hackers had access to its data for years. The private records of more than 200 customers were compromised due to a security flaw that impacted its database.
Following the discovery, the telecom giant started an internal investigation in order to determine the scope of the attack. The investigation revealed that that unauthorized access to the company’s system has been ongoing since May 2016; the breach went undetected until May 2021.
“The results of the investigation revealed that the unauthorized access began in May 2016. Syniverse’s investigation revealed that the individual or organization gained unauthorized access to databases within its network on several occasions, and that login information allowing access to or from its Electronic Data Transfer (“EDT”) environment was compromised for approximately 235 of its customers,” the company stated in its SEC filing.
According to a source who works at Syniverse, the attackers could have gained access to call records and message data, such as call length and cost, caller and receiver’s numbers, the location of the calling parties, the content of SMS text messages, and more.
“Syniverse is a common exchange hub for carriers around the world passing billing info back and forth to each other. So, it inevitably carries sensitive info like call records, data usage records, text messages, etc. […] The thing is—I don’t know exactly what was being exchanged in that environment. One would have to imagine though it easily could be customer records and [personal identifying information] given that Syniverse exchanges call records and other billing details between carriers,” an industry insider told Motherboard.
