SMS Routing Company 'Syniverse' Admits it was Hacked in 2016

Syniverse provides backbone services to wireless carriers like AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and several other carriers. It discovered the breach in May 2021 but it began in May of 2016.

Syniverse repeatedly declined to answer specific questions from Motherboard about the scale of the breach and what specific data was affected, but according to a person who works at a telephone carrier, whoever hacked Syniverse could have had access to metadata such as length and cost, caller and receiver’s numbers, the location of the parties in the call, as well as the content of SMS text messages.

Phone Companies Must Block Carriers That Don't Follow FCC Rules

Phone companies must now block traffic from voice service providers that don’t comply with new FCC robocall rules.

Specifically, phone companies must block traffic from other “voice service providers that have neither certified to implementation of STIR/SHAKEN caller ID authentication standards nor filed a detailed robocall mitigation plan with the FCC.”

‘Non-Standalone’ 5G Exposes Phones to Stingray Police Surveillance

5G that uses “non-standalone architecture” is rife with security issues and doesn’t protect people from Stingray police surveillance.

Borgaonkar and fellow researcher Altaf Shaik, a senior research scientist at TU Berlin, found that major carriers in Norway and Germany are still putting out 5G in non-standalone mode, which means that those connections are still susceptible to stingrays. The two presented at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas last week.