Security News
The United States threatened Thursday to cut off Beijing-controlled China Telecom from serving the US market because of legal and security risks, the Justice Department announced Thursday. The agencies making the recommendation - which also included the Justice Department, the Commerce Department, and the US Trade Representative - said China Telecom is vulnerable to "Exploitation, influence and control" by the Chinese government.
Service providers and telecom carriers form the backbone of communications and commerce in modern economies. Data from F5 Labs shows that over the past few years DDoS and brute force attacks are the most common vectors for the service provider industry, both when the customer was the ultimate target and when the service provider was.
A recently discovered TrickBot variant targeting telecommunications organizations in the United States and Hong Kong includes a module for remote desktop protocol brute-forcing, Bitdefender reports. Now, its operators apparently added a new rdpScanDll module to the threat, to brute-force RDP for a specific list of victims.
President Donald Trump on Thursday signed into law a bill that provides $1 billion to help small telecom providers replace equipment made by China's Huawei and ZTE. The U.S. government considers the Chinese companies a security risk and has pushed its allies not to use Huawei equipment in next-generation cellular networks, known as 5G. Both companies have denied that China uses their products for spying. The Federal Communications Commission has already voted to bar U.S. phone companies from using government subsidies for equipment from the two Chinese companies.
Threat actors linked to China increasingly targeted the telecommunications sector in 2019, according to endpoint security firm CrowdStrike. In the case of the telecom sector, many of the attacks were attributed to China-linked hacker groups, including the ones tracked as Wicked Panda, Emissary Panda, and Lotus Panda.
US regulators moved to impose fines Friday against the nation's four major wireless carriers for selling location data of customers without their consent. The wireless firms were accused of having disclosed mobile network user location data to a third party without authorization from customers, the FCC said.
$11 Million Fine for Authentication Shortcomings at Telecommunications ProviderOne of the largest fines to date for violating the EU's General Data Protection Regulation has been announced by...
$11 Million Fine for Authentication Shortcomings at Telecommunications ProviderOne of the largest fines to date for breaching the EU's General Data Protection Regulation has been announced by...
Chinese tech giant Huawei is asking a U.S. federal court to throw out a rule that bars rural phone carriers from using government money to purchase its equipment on security grounds. read more
U.S. communications regulators have cut off government funding for equipment from two Chinese companies, citing security threats. read more