Tuesday, May 05, 2020

Limitations in existing communication protocols make all networks vulnerable

Giovani Henrique, general manager of Positive Technologies for Latin America alerted this in the dialogue with Convergencialatina. Using the SS7 signaling protocol, widely used in fixed and mobile networks, the number of confirmed attacks on operators reaches an average of 4,000 per day. Likewise, with the Diameter protocol on 4G networks, susceptibility to denial of service attacks remains.

The most frequent fraud incidents for telecommunications operators are observed in the sending of USSD and SMS (9 out of 10 SMS are intercepted), and the interception of voice calls, as Giovani Henrique, general manager of Positive Technologies for Latin Americatold Convergencialatina. The global cybersecurity company conducts some twenty surveys annually to analyze network vulnerability and identify top threats to operators. Among the recent results of these works, Positive revealed that the number of successful denial of service attacks on networks using the Diameter protocol increased by 3% from 2018 (38%) to 2019 (41%).

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