The Athens Affair – The most audacious cell-network break-in (2007)

http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/security/the-athens-affair

by milkshakes • 12 years ago

77 11 12 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

signa11• 12 years ago

it is very difficult to imagine this kind of stuff happening right under the noses of seasoned n/w administrators without implicit complicity of one or more state actors...

mercurial• 12 years ago

Considering the scale of the attack, it's pretty obvious that state actors are behind it.

elorant• 12 years ago

Audacious hackers my ass. That was clearly the job of some major foreign intelligence service. The triangle of tampered antennas included among other things the US embassy. Granted, we Greeks have a tendency for conspiracy theories, especially if they involve Americans, but this particular attack was way too sophisticated to be carried by individuals. And how on earth would an individual gain access to network infrastructure of one of the largest carrier providers in the country?

Not to mention the fact that everyone in the list of targets were in one way or the other directly connected with the government. Hackers usually don’t go for such high-profile targets unless there are some state actors involved.

trab• 12 years ago

This is the link to the wikipedia article about the "hack" http://tinyurl.com/l2pfdew (Using tiny url because greek chars on the url get really messy on copy paste).

Translated excerpt from the wikipedia link above. "Two years later, in 2010 the case reopened with the advent of new evidence suggesting espionage with involvement of the American embassy."

I put hack on double quotes because it was anything but a hack. This was coordinated from within the phone carrier and the company that wrote the software, with the management most probably being aware of it.

zz1• 12 years ago

Every USA embassy is a spying station: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=ndx...

at-fates-hands• 12 years ago

Agreed.

In this regards, it wouldn't take much. For a seasoned state spy to turn someone and get them to do this for them for some extra cash would be child's play.

noselasd• 12 years ago

And how on earth would an individual gain access to network >infrastructure of one of the largest carrier providers in >the country?

way easier than most people think. The telco networks are walled gardens. Once you're in, you're in. (Though, security have been getting better the last years.).

But really, all you need is to break into a base station and hook up your own gear. A fair bit of knowledge of the protocols, and the unsecured stuff you can get access to in the core network are quite amazing once you're on the fixed side of a BTS (as opposed to the radio side that your mobile phone is on).

Similarly, you can dig up a fiber and pass it through your own equipment. This isn't something your run of the mill wifi wardriver is going to be able to do, but certainly something a skilled individual can do.

tbhoc• 12 years ago

Tsalikidis' family and their lawyers asked for the case to be reopened, claiming that forensic medical examination results prove that Tsalikidis' death could not have been suicide [1]

[1] http://www.enet.gr/?i=news.el.article&id=307811

fithisux• 12 years ago

No matter what people say, a young man is dead and no one is in jail. I am a Greek , but I cannot see how this is good for my country and security. No matter if a foreign agency is implicated, this is treason. They care for their interest, we do not.

chollida1• 12 years ago

They took advantage of the fact that the AXE allows new software to be installed without rebooting the system, an important feature when any interruption would disconnect phone calls, lose text messages, and render emergency services unreachable. To let an AXE exchange run continuously for decades, as many of them do, Ericsson's software uses several techniques for handling failures and upgrading an exchange's software without suspending its operation. These techniques allow the direct patching of code loaded in the central processor, in effect altering the operating system on the fly.

Since the is an Ericsson switch my first thought was that they describing Erlang's hot code swapping being used here.

Can anyone confirm if this is the case?

If so that's a pretty big testament to the robustness of Erlang that it can allow switches to run for decades at a time and update themselves on the fly!

I really should be doing more with Erlang!

bglazer• 12 years ago

Executable code is what results when a software compiler turns source code—in the case of the AXE, programs written in the PLEX language—into the binary machine code that a computer processor executes.

That was my first thought as well, but it looks like they used a language called "PLEX" that is specifically built for the AXE switches.

The Athens Affair – The most audacious cell-network break-in (2007)

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