Phone Tapping in Greece

Comment:

 

This is huge and strange and scary... but not because it was meant to remain secret!

The unknown agency, who planned and executed this, made sure that it was going to be detected quite soon - much sooner than it took the Greek government to make it public.
All indications point to the direction of a staged "espionage scandal" that was set up as a time bomb to explode in the faces of many big players simultaneously.

The method chosen to tap Greece's 100 high-profile cellphones, i.e. by hacking directly into the cellphone service provider's system (rather than capturing, diverting and decrypting the targeted cellphone signals "from the air"), ensured the earliest possible detection of this false-flag operation.

And the fact that the culprits didn't even bother to isolate their primary targets from the clutter of "normal" Vodafone mobile users in the vicinity of their "shadow cellphones" makes their ulterior (non-tapping) motives even more blatant. The unsuspecting clients would naturally complain about the random losses of SMS messages - as they did - even if Vodafone's own network security staff had somehow missed the bleeps from a sizeable bug in their system.

According to the latest information circulating in the Greek media, the malicious code that activated Vodafone's "lawful interception" module was a copy of the software used by all four local mobile operators during the Athens 2004 Olympics under the C4I Protocol of telecom surveillance. The Seven Sisters of the global intelligence community were put in charge of C4I to ensure security from terrorist threat by monitoring thousands of wired and wireless Greek phones during the Games without much ado.

C4I was officially de-commissioned after the Olympics while its customised "lawful interception" modules and software components with access keys to the local phone company systems where supposedly destroyed. But at least one of the seven "end users" chose to keep a "copy" and use it to pull a trick on naive fellow signatories of the C4I Protocol, reminding them that total surrender to the Cryptocracy comes with no expiry date.

~ From: Schneier on Security ~