According to the testimony of an alert launcher, the Israeli company proposed to buy cash access to the US telephone network in 2017.
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In the heart of the summer of 2017, Gary Miller, a framework of Mobileum, an American company that designs secure software for mobile networks, is invited to participate in a telephone meeting. An Israeli society, NSO Group, contacted Mobileum; They say they are very interested in the “connections” that the firm with the American telephone operators.
But the meeting does not take place at all as Mr. Miller had imagined. The flagship product of Mobileum is a software solution for 3G and 4G networks, which monitors any abnormal traffic – and therefore detect possible attacks. NSO Group does not intend to buy this software: what is Israeli business looking for, it is an access to the networks of American mobile operators. What would mobile get in exchange? “We deposit liquid silver bags at your offices,” replies the co-founder of NSO Group, Omri Lavie, according to Gary Miller’s testimony, who got the help of the alert launcher defense organization Whistleblower AID and provided evidence of his story to the member for California Ted W. (Democrat).
NSO Group is in the heart of the Pegasus scandal, the name of the high-performance spy software that the company sold to many countries, which used it to spy on lawyers, journalists and human rights activists. But at the time, if the company is looking for access points to the US telephone network, it is for another service that it offers with its subsidiary Circles.
Circles sells a geolocation service, which allows you to locate very precisely where a mobile phone is located from its only number. To do this, it operates a security flaw in the SS7 protocol, a central software brick in the transfer of data to and from a mobile, but which is unsecured. In 2014, IT security researchers had demonstrated that with network access it is possible to operate faults of this protocol to not only access the geolocation of the phone, but also capture SMS or voice calls.
In a written answer to the Washington Post, a partner with Le Monde and fourteen other writing of the “Pegasus project” coordinated by Forbidden Stories, Mobileum affirmed “[do] not] and [never] EU] commercial relationship with NSO Group “; The company also ensures that, contrary to what Israeli society thought, it does not have direct access to the operator network, and therefore could not provide it with a stolen door. In a written message, a spokesman for Omri Lavie, the co-founder of Nso Goup who participated in the meeting and who would have proposed the “cash bag”, according to Mr. Miller’s testimony, denies any malversion. “No contract was signed with Mobileum” and Mr. Lavie “has no memory of using this expression,” he says; If that had been the case, “it was very clearly a joke”.
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