Security researchers have uncovered two separate spying campaigns that are abusing well-known weaknesses in the global telecoms infrastructure to track people’s locations. The researchers say these two campaigns are likely a small snapshot of what they believe to be widespread exploitation of surveillance vendors seeking access to global phone networks.
On Thursday, the Citizen Lab, a digital rights organization with more than a decade of experience exposing surveillance abuses, published a new report detailing the two newly identified campaigns. The surveillance vendors behind them, which Citizen Lab did not name, operated as “ghost” companies that pretended to be legitimate cellular providers, and would piggyback their access to those networks to look up the location data of their targets.
