30 December 2016

Mobile operators in West Africa are the biggest targets for Signalling System 7 (SS7) attacks on the continent, according to research by AdaptiveMobile.

In research conducted by its Threat Intelligence Unit, the mobile network security specialist found that 39 per cent of all African operators attacked via SS7 were in West Africa.

AdaptiveMobile analysed SS7 packets sent worldwide over a four-month period and said that it was able to see a regional breakdown of where attacks were being targeted.

It found that operators in West Africa and were “heavily targeted”. North and East African operators were also affected, with 42 per cent of all operators attacked in the analysis located in these two regions.

By hacking into the SS7 network, attackers can read texts, listen to calls, and track a mobile user’s locations.

AdaptiveMobile’s research showed that 65 per cent of all operators in its analysis were affected by location tracking attacks, and 100 per cent were affected by subscriber harvesting attacks.    

Meanwhile in early November 2016, it was widely reported that Liberia had become the first country to have its entire internet taken down following a DDoS attack.

Experts said ‘Mirai’ was used – the same malware that crippled sites such as Netflix and eBay earlier in 2016. The source code for Mirai is freely available online.

The attack is thought to have come from a single source and therefore may have been the work of a lone attacker.

Botnets targeted the companies that co-own the fibre cables into the country and flooded the network with traffic.

Liberia’s subsea fibre connectivity comes via ACE and this is then extended across a national backbone developed by the Cable Consortium of Liberia which is made up of local telcos.