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Comment by wealthyyy | Hacker News Reader

This is not a SS7 attack. SS7 attacks doesn't work in practice. Eg A lot of carriers in US are CDMA. GSMA Carriers like AT&T has great firewalls in place to block SS7 attacks.

Further, You can detect SS7 attacks. Major Banks already has measures in place...

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SS7 attacks work in practice.

Any network in existence that has roaming enabled is vulnerable to fake roaming requests, and they cannot be "firewalled."

Seeing you implying that CDMA is somehow more resistant than GSM means you know very little how cell networks work. The telephony layer for both is SS7.

The Banks already has anti fraud detection systems in place to detect Roaming attacks. They can see whether number is Roaming enabled or not.

The Telecoms do prevent it with Firewalls.

As for CDMA, Please see,

https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Verizon%20SS7%20L...

Banks cannot see if a number is in roaming or not, unless the phone company explicitly tells them through some means.

I so far never heard of anything like this.

How come you forget about HLR?

Banks can see. There are lot of APIs on the web that provides this capability.

One example,

https://www.messagebird.com/lookup/

That looks more interesting. Never heard of such APIs being sold for more than a single operator.

How many operators in the world sell them this access?

https://positive-tech.com/products/signalling-firewall/

Please try attacking this Firewall.

Are you working there?

No. I've tested it anyway.

You still sound as if you are working in the industry. Are you?

Isn't it? SMS relies on SS7 to exchange messages. It may not be a direct attack on the network itself, but because of outside dependencies and a history of telcos trusting themselves to get it right (or simply not caring when it's wrong), this attack successfully results in messages getting routed elsewhere on the network.

This attack is based on a Routing network not SS7.

CDMA carriers don't use SS7 for SMS unless you're on Roaming.

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