Two Spy Campaigns Exploit Telecom Flaws to Track Phones
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- Citizen Lab uncovered two separate spying campaigns that abuse weaknesses in the SS7 and Diameter protocols across 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G networks to track people's phone locations.
- Two unnamed surveillance vendors, whose customers are likely government agencies, allegedly carried out the campaigns by abusing access to at least three telecom companies — one in Israel, one in the UK, and one in Jersey (Channel Island).
- The campaigns exploit long-known telecom vulnerabilities that can persist undetected for years, with operators acting as trusted telecom entities while sending invisible SMS to target phones, per the Citizen Lab report.
- TechRadar specifically reports that using a VPN cannot protect against this tracking, since the exploitation occurs at the carrier-network level rather than on the user's device.
- The UK regulator has closed a loophole that allowed rogue companies to track phone users' locations, per Reuters — a concrete regulatory response that most other coverage frames as merely a research revelation.
Why it matters: The vulnerabilities exploited are protocol-level — baked into the global telecom infrastructure used by billions — and TechRadar's reporting that a VPN offers no protection means everyday consumer privacy tools are useless against this attack vector. The UK regulator closing the loophole is a first step, but the SS7 and Diameter flaws persist across 2G through 5G networks worldwide, meaning users in any country could be tracked covertly for years without detection.
