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Hackers Claim To Hit T-Mobile Hard
dasButcher writes "Hackers are
claiming to own T-Mobile USA's servers and to have access to the cellular phone carrier's operations, finance and subscriber data." (Here's the seclists.org post of the claimed breach.)
Why isn't this stuff encrypted? For the few places that would need the data why not have a special viewer that would decrypt the stuff thats sensitive?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Funny - I get an fraud warning from the link disclosing the breach . . . Opera being over-sensitive I think. "This site is known to distribute malicious software" - NMap has got such a bad name!!
If you are, you better start thinking about where to go next. Their service is now wide open. Anything transferred through their network is now questionable.
Can you afford to send an email from a smartphone and have a couple of bytes changed, say from "no" to "yes"? Or from $100 to $10,000?
Can you afford to have your phone records available to everyone on the Internet? How far back could T-Mobile's records go? Two years? Five years?
I'd say if this was played right to the media it could shut T-Mobile down in about two weeks. After all, wouldn't that be a great goal? Their inability to keep hackers out equals no reason to be in business.
Of course this was almost certainly an inside-assisted job. But then you better watch who your employees are. If you're employing people that have access to potentially sensitive data, how do you know they aren't in a financial bind and will do anything to make next month's mortgage payment? Or have some gambling debts that they have to pay or their wife will work off?
I won't be happy to see T-Mobile (really Vodaphone from Germany) go under, but if these hackers have half a brain they will take the company down. If they are just your average script kiddies this will not make to the nightly news and will have no effect on the company.
A better question is why is there so little competition in SMS prices - is there collusion to avoid competition?
Yes. The marginal cost is very close to zero, so when all the telecoms raise prices nearly simultaneously as they did a few years ago, collusion is by far the most likely explanation.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Why am I complaining? Because I believe very firmly that in the past few years the telecommunications market has fallen victim to collusion.
It seems that many /.ers confuse the price people will pay with the correct price. See, the price you will pay is NOT the right price. The maximum price you will pay, correlated to the minimum price the supplier will charge, is the right price. That's where monopolies, duopolies, and collusion break things up. They make it so that the minimum price the supplier will charge is never reached, as they intentionally limit supply.
If you want a more abstract example of the harm that high SMS prices do, in a market where it's nigh impossible to break in, ask yourself why SMSes aren't more integrated into everyday life. I don't just mean human-to-human messages. I mean things like controlling your home thermostat. Or having your bike or car report its location, speed, etc. There are lots of uses for these kinds of short messages, but the insanely high cost per byte makes it completely prohibitive.
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
What? Are you 12? Seriously, with a response like that how do you not expect people to just ignore you since you don't even offer anything to the conversation. Just shouting "WRONG" doesn't change anything and only serves to strengthen the other side. Rather than childish name-calling perhaps you could add something of value rather than wasting everyone's time? Maybe not...
There are those of us that intercept and redirect cell transmissions because of the absurdly high costs of everything. Why use cell minutes when you can create your own mini-tower and use your internal PBX? Many companies are investing many thousands of dollars in equipment because it pays off fast. If individual companies can do it cheaper then a single cellular provider simply has no excuse for such high rates, especially given the obvious collusion in the industry.
Well, under perfect competition, the price *does* equal the marginal cost in equilibrium. The complaint that SMS prices are too high is legitimate in a situation where there is a high cost to entry preventing competition from driving the price down, as in the telecommunications industry. In these situations governments have a potentially important role to play (think about how other major utilities, like power companies, are run). So, yes, many folks may be willing to pay $X for SMS messages, but this may not be the socially efficient price due to the uncompetitiveness of the industry.
This doesn't surprise me at all. I used to work there a few years ago. Security was not something they were concerned with in the least. RSH was used everywhere and they refused even use telnet let alone ssh. The root passwords on all the Unix servers that controlled the switch was the name of the switch manufacturer. So Nokia was nokia and Nortel was nortel. Frankly this wasn't the worst thing there, don't try to do anything that might improve service or change the way things are done because that would upset the norm.
Far more likely: one did a market study, noticed that the customers neither knew nor cared what the price was, and so tried a price increase. The others quickly noticed that he lost no business and so followed suit.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
FWIW - I don't know if it could be related or quite how, exactly, but I am a T-mobile client in the SE US, and noticed yesterday and the evening before that calls were dropping like crazy. Very, very inconsistent from their usual service, IME. T-mobile has shown good network 'uptime' since they bought out a smaller cellular company I was with about 18 months ago. (They *have* tried to dick me for a little extra cash here and there on my bill, but were good after a call to billing.) The unusual poor performance I was witness to yesterday in conjunction with this story makes me go "Hmmm...", while hoping it bears out as untrue.
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
Why? Because their grammar is less than perfect? I hope you have more to go on then that. TFA had a poster who said he was a former employee and recognized server names from the posted log file. He could be a plant or a wannabe but its worth mentioning at least. Frankly if there was nothing to this, I'd expect t-mobile to be yelling from the roof tops. The fact that they are fairly quiet suggests there could be trouble. -rilian
...quicker, easier, more seductive the darkside is...but more powerful, it is not.
I do not applaud law-breaking, but nobody deserves it more than you do. Worst company I've ever had the displeasure of doing business with.
Where do I sign up for the class action suit? I long-ago canceled my account, but I couldn't delete my private information out of your system.
We forget these guys are no different than the robbers and thugs you see on "cops" or the evening news
When thieves rob ordinary citizens, it's sad.
When thieves rob other thieves, it's schadenfreude.