[vayup]

Some of the stuff that was extracted from the unencrypted traffic in the link:

- T-Mobile backhaul: Users' SMS, voice call contents and internet traffic content in plain text.

- AT&T Mexico cellular backhaul: Raw user internet traffic

- TelMex VOIP on satellite backhaul: Plaintext voice calls

- U.S. military: SIP traffic exposing ship names

- Mexico government and military: Unencrypted intra-government traffic

- Walmart Mexico: Unencrypted corporate emails, plaintext credentials to inventory management systems, inventory records transferred and updated using FTP

This is insane!

While it is important to work on futuristic threats such as Quantum cryptanalysis, backdoors in standardized cryptographic protocols, etc. - the unfortunate reality is that the vast majority of real-world attacks happen because basic protection is not enabled. Good reminder not take our eyes off the basics.

[alfiedotwtf]

> This is insane!

Not as insane as it was in the early 2000s…

> while link-layer encryption has been standard practice in satellite TV for decades

Before Snowden, I would say 99% of ALL TCP traffic I saw on satellites was in unadulterated plain-text. Web and email mostly.

… the pipe was so fast, you could only pcap if you had a SCSI hard drive!

[petercooper]

I was exposed to some of this as a teenager due to a (now dead) family member being heavily into telecoms. You could receive and process POCSAG (the protocol used by paging systems) to pretty much read the entire stream of unencrypted, plain text pager messages going out over the wire. You could also reprogram a generic pager to receive pages for whatever number you liked. You could also transmit your own POCSAG and send any number a page (only within your transmission range).

SMS was also a bit like this in its early days and you could read them coming off the local cell (also true of calls at a certain time, but I didn't see much of this).

I just did a quick search and apparently many pagers in the UK are still running cleartext POCSAG! https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/comments/1asnchu/are_uk_page...

[T3OU-736]

```… the pipe was so fast, you could only pcap if you had a SCSI hard drive!```

This is why NSA asked for (and got from SGI) a guranteed rate I/O API - to make sure that whstever the signal intelkigence platform sensors captured could be written to storage.

[feraloink]

In https://satcom.sysnet.ucsd.edu/ Has The Issue Been Fixed section:

>we re-scanned with their permission and were able to verify a remedy had been deployed: T-Mobile, WalMart, and KPU.

The fact that critical infrastructure (e.g. utility companies using satellite links for remote-operated SCADA) was exposed is really scary too.

[colechristensen]

>The fact that critical infrastructure (e.g. utility companies using satellite links for remote-operated SCADA) was exposed is really scary too.

Really serious security risks in critical/industrial infrastructure are ... numerous. And these aren't complex vulnerabilities, these are leaving the door open with default passwords, unencrypted traffic, and that sort of thing.

[jabiko]

When driving by Bad Aibling I always wondered why the BND (intelligence agency) invests so heavily in satellite communication eavesdropping. I naively assumed that this kind of communication would be encrypted.

Also a fun fact: For a long time it was only semi-officially known that the BND owned and operated the site. Officially it was called "Long distance telecommunications station of the Bundeswehr" and operated by the "Federal Office for Telecommunications Statistics"

[MagnumOpus]

At least since the mid-1990s Echelon revelations in the EU parliament anybody who cares knows that Bad Aibling (and similar stations all across Europe like Bude/Morwenstow in the UK) had been operated by the NSA in collaboration with US Army intelligence (if the official name of “18th United States Army Security Agency Field Station” didn’t clue you in.

Officially it has been transferred to the BND; experience suggests all data from there still goes straight back to Fort Meade… (And in exchange the BND gets some morsels back on people _they_ are not allowed to spy on publicly.)

[RajT88]

I'm waiting for IT departments worldwide to wake up to the threat that your browsers are leaking all of your URI's by default back to the manufacturers.

URI's leak company secrets. I'm sure there's some people at Google using Edge which are leaking company data to Microsoft. I'm sure there's some people at Microsoft using Chrome which are leaking data to Google.

Edge and Chrome both send back every URI you visit to "improve search results" or to "sync history across devices". It's not clear if this includes private mode traffic or not (they don't say).

Huge privacy hole to allow this, and nobody seems to be aware or care.

[fmobus]

For that to be in anyway useful for those companies (as a means to spy on their competitors), they'd have to be actively looking into the information to derive intelligence. Not really practical without some serious engineering, which would leave tons of evidence. It's not worth it. That's just not how these companies operate.

> there's some people at Google using Edge

I'd be surprised if it's more than a handful of people with explicit exceptions for work-related tasks. Chrome is the norm.

[pengaru]

Wait til you hear about how many companies willfully perform all their work in g-suite and office 365/teams

[zelos]

> Real-time military object telemetry with precise geolocation, identifiers, and live telemetry

Oops

[NoiseBert69]

Pulls out the bamboo whip

Another round of OpSec training

[rurban]

Did you check how hospitals or governments treat sensitive patient data? They are transported in clear (no TLS) over the net from the hospital or ensurers databases to the practitioners. Not on 80, but still just plain DICOM XML. With full names and all the sensitive data. That's a bit more insane IMHO.

The new German ecard patient system is also trivial to hack, as shown multiple times on CCC. As long as no one goes to jail, they will continue like this.

[CGMthrowaway]

Is there a git repo that lets one read this stuff in real time yet?