The Great SIM Heist: How Spies Stole the Keys to the Encryption Castle
"TOP-SECRET GCHQ documents reveal that the intelligence agencies accessed the email and Facebook accounts of engineers and other employees of major telecom corporations and SIM card manufacturers in an effort to secretly obtain information that could give them access to millions of encryption keys. They did this by utilizing the NSA’s X-KEYSCORE program, which allowed them access to private emails hosted by the SIM card and mobile companies’ servers, as well as those of major tech corporations, including Yahoo and Google."First, it came for the terrorists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a terrorist.Then, it came for the muslims, and I did not speak out, because I was not a muslim.Then, it came for the Dutch, Belgian, and German engineers, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Dutch, Belgian, or German engineer.If you're an engineer, developer, sales staff, or pretty much anything else, and you work at a company that has something worth stealing, you should think about how this ends. If they don't come for you first, your personal life is now completely fair game for nation state attackers.They will stop at nothing, they have limitless budgets, they will attack your private life, they will reflash the firmware in components of your personal devices, and they will stalk you. Even when you did nothing wrong, even when your employer did nothing wrong, even when your social graph is in no way linked to anyone who ever did anything wrong.