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Comment by freeqaz | Hacker News Reader

I work in security and this surprised me to see. Not that these companies got hacked, but the scope of the attack being simultaneous. Coordinated. Popping multiple companies at the same time says something about the goals the PRD has.

It risks a lot of "noise" to do it this way. Why not just bribe employees to listen in on high profile targets? Why try to hit them all and create a top level response at the Presidential level?

This feels optics-driven and political. I'm not sure what it means, but it's interesting to ponder on. Attacking infrastructure is definitely the modern "cold war" of our era.

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This is a total yawn, and the norm. It looks coordinated because the team who focuses specifically on telecoms had their tools burned. Pick pretty much any sector of interest and the intelligence services of the top 50 countries all have a team dedicated to hacking it. The majority of them are successful.

Sadly even most people in security are woefully unaware of the scope and scale of these operations, even within the networks they are responsible for.

The "noise" here was not from the attacker. They don't want to get caught. But sometimes mistakes happen.

Interestingly, some of those teams dedicated to hacking are either private sector or a branch that nobody has heard of. I once interviewed for a company whose pitch to me was basically "we get indemnity to hack foreign telcos" and "we develop ways to spy that nobody has thought of". That was 20 years ago

What do those companies look like externally? Are they publically known?

Some are specialized, some are diversified. Definitely public, I believe they all have to be listed on fedgov's contractor list? Some are obvious weapons contractors, some aren't (like extensions of big-name universities). If you see job listings for weapons development, cyber ops, secret-clearance software dev, cryptography, etc, that's a clue.

It probably wasn't a simultaneous attack, they probably penetrated over a long period of time. The defenders just found them all simultaneously (you find one, you go looking for the others)

> Why not just bribe employees to listen in on high profile targets?

Developing assets is complicated and difficult, attacking SS7 remotely is trivial, especially if you have multiple targets to surveil

Given the noise about huawaie and spy cranes, it would be interesting to know if the "attacks" were against any and all telecoms equipment, or just chinese stuff, not that I think it would make any difference. The daylight (heh heh!) trolling for telecom and power cables, is most definitly a (he ha!) signal, aimed at western politicians. Another one, is that while there are claims of North Korea , taking crypto, no identifiable victim has stood up. Western politicians are attempting to redirect the whole worlds economy, based on saving us from the very things that are happening, just now. So it does seem more than coincidental.

Aren't they attacks against the US government mandated backdoors in all equipment?

I think this is the perfect time to do something like this, in the midst of a presidential transition. Regardless of the outgoing and incoming politics, things will be more chaotic. While it won't be unnoticed, it's going to be down the lists of things to deal with probably, and possibly forgotten.

The most incompetent crook is the first one to get caught.

There's a huge selection bias factored into what attacks make the news.

Incompetence is just one dimension on odds of being caught.

You could be an incredibly competent and highly motivated crook and bad luck in the form of an intern looking at logs or a cleaning lady spotting you entering a building could take you down.

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