This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss screwed-up telecom systems, tech exec sermons, and TikTok trends.
JOSEPH: This week, I wrote about how an official from CISA broke rank from his agency and publicly revealed a series of SS7 and related attacks. You might not have heard about SS7; it is a very obscure thing that only really concerns telecommunications professionals or the spies and governments that leverage it. But it is an age-old problem that comes up again and again and again, showing how fundamentally screwed much of the telecommunications space is.
One way of looking at it is the technical reality of SS7 (spy firms can still use this legacy protocol to track people, etc). Another is how I or other journalists end up writing a story about SS7 every couple of years or so, and the situation in some ways just seems to get worse as time moves on. I think for next week’s podcast we may do a bigger episode on SS7, the threats, the issues, what has happened over the years to get people up to speed, but for subscribers here is an overview of some of my SS7 coverage over the years.