The National Security Agency, NSA, has spied on hundreds of companies and groups around the world, including countries allied with the U.S. government, as part of an effort to allow U.S. agents to tap into and monitor any mobile phone network, regardless of the country it is in, according to a report released Thursday.
Knowing the technical details of a particular mobile phone provider or network, agents secretly attempt to find or create security holes that would allow them to intercept and monitor mobile phones. Security experts warn that programs that find or build security holes could cause widespread damage, since these security holes could also be exploited by criminal hackers or governments of other countries for espionage.
“Even if you love the NSA and have nothing to hide, you should be against a policy that builds security vulnerabilities,” says Karsten Nohl, a cryptographer and smartphone. “Because once the NSA builds or finds a weakness in the network, it’s not just the NSA that can exploit that.”
This is not the first time the US agency has been reported to be building backdoors into widely used technologies. Last year, documents provided by former NSA employee Edward Snowden showed that the NSA was working on encryption technologies with known vulnerabilities in them. Two weeks later, EMC's RSA division warned its customers to stop using the default configuration of the BSAFE toolkit and Data Protection Manager because they contain code with a vulnerability intentionally crafted by the NSA.
