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.
Check It Out: SMS Routing Company ‘Syniverse’ Admits it was Hacked in 2016
Andrew:
This is why the tech industry, including the major carriers, need better regulation.
It might be their service, but it’s our data. Silence is not an option, and secrecy is self-serving. The public have the primary stake in this, and have a right to know if/how much their data were compromised, and what was done to fix it.
Representative government can only work when legislators and political parties are not being bankrolled by dark/opaque money.
Campaign finance reform and party donations need stricter limits and greater disclosure, with stiff penalties on both the donor and recipient for non-compliance, as in ineligibility to elected office for the recipient and disallowance to make donations for the donor for a fixed period.
If it doesn’t hurt, it’s not a deterrent.