14 DAY TRIAL // The NSA and its international partners from the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada have a whole list of telecom companies that they’ve managed to infiltrate in order to create an accurate map of all Internet devices in the world.
Deutsche Telekom is one of the bigger names on the list, but they’re not the only ones targeted by the “Treasure Map” program. In fact, Der Spiegel reports that the list includes other companies as well, such as Netcologne, Cetel, IABG, and Stellar.
The information comes from Edward Snowden’s leaked NSA documents and expands the “Treasure Map” topic, which was already exposed last year to the telecom companies in Germany.
While Deutsche Telekom and the others are what you’d call traditional telecom companies, Stellar provides services that are a little different, since they depend on satellites.
Der Spiegel reports that the attack on Stellar is similar to the one undergone by the GCHQ on the Belgian provider Belgacom, which was exposed a year ago. The Network Analysis department penetrated the Belgacom network and its subsidiary BICS by hacking employee computers before preparing routers for cyber-attacks.
The newspaper decided to share some of the information it had on the attacks on Stellar with the company’s Christian Steffen, CEO, and three other employees that were on the GCHQ’s list of targeted surveillance.
At the first peruse of the documents, Steffen cursed. He sees the files as proof that his company’s systems were illegally breached after he noticed that the hacked server stood behind the company’s firewall. “The only way of accessing it is if you first successfully break into our network,” he says.
Ali Fares, IT chief at the company, was also shocked to see the files, saying that details presented there, including an internal table showing which Stellar customers are being served by which specific satellite transponders, which are, of course, company secrets and sensitive information.
Agencies could cut off Internet access, manipulate links, emails
The four members of Stellar looked over all the documents and concluded that the information gathered by the intelligence agency could allow them to cut off Internet access to customers in, for instance, Africa, while also allowing them to manipulate links and emails.
“Our customer traffic doesn't run across conventional fiber optic lines. In the eyes of intelligence services, we are apparently seen as difficult to access. That doesn't give anyone the right to break in,” says Steffen.
He adds that such a cyber-attack is a criminal offense under German law. He wants to know why they were targeted and how the attack was concluded, if for no other reason than to be able to better protect the network and the company’s customers in the future.
Steffen even wrote a letter to the British government asking for an explanation, but no answer has been received so far.