New Simjacker Attack Exploited In the Wild To Track Users For At Least Two Years

'Security researchers have disclosed today a major SMS-based attack
method being abused in the real world by a surveillance vendor to
track and monitor individuals. An anonymous reader shares a report:
"We are quite confident that this exploit has been developed by a
specific private company that works with governments to monitor
individuals," security researchers from AdaptiveMobile Security said
in a report. "We believe this vulnerability has been exploited for at
least the last 2 years by a highly sophisticated threat actor in
multiple countries, primarily for the purposes of surveillance."

The attack, named Simjacker, works by attackers sending SMS messages
to victims' phones. The SMS messages contain STK instructions that are
run by a victim's SIM card to gather location data and the IMEI code,
which is then sent through an SMS message to a logging system.
Researchers said they've seen Simjacker being abused to track hundreds
of victims for two years, yet it is unclear if the victims are
criminals tracked by law enforcement, or dissidents tracked by
oppressive regimes. Over one billion smartphone users use SIM cards
deemed vulnerable to this attack.'

-- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/09/12/1637232

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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