The big carriers have had quite a month. Here's a rundown.
- Verizon acknowledges, deflects, and then ignores required protection for your calls: Carnegie Mellon’s CERT/CC published a vulnerability disclosure: Verizon’s VoLTE calls lack mandatory IPSec encryption, which leaves users vulnerable to call hijacking, caller ID spoofing, denial of service, and manipulation of emergency calls. Verizon initially acknowledged the vulnerability and promised a fix, but then asserted that the requirements weren’t actually mandatory, and finally stopped participating in the disclosure process entirely and provided no evidence of any mitigation.
- Speaking of dodgy carriers, AT&T was accused of covering up data breaches: A whistleblower complaint, filed in 2020 by a former IBM VP of threat intelligence, alleges that IBM and AT&T were repeatedly breached by foreign state actors, including a China-nexus hacking group, and disclosed none of it to federal agencies. The alleged breach count is over 56,000 intrusions between 2013 and 2016.
- Why are telecoms so insecure? It's a fair question. Our Chief Architect David Dunn breaks down exactly what happens during a cellular connection, and why so much of the legacy infrastructure was never designed with your privacy in mind.
- The Supreme Court says AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have to pay for selling your location data: In an 8-1 ruling, the Supreme Court upheld the FCC's authority to fine the major carriers for selling customers' real-time location data to third-party brokers, who then resold it further down the chain. AT&T was hit with a $57 million penalty, Verizon with $47 million, and T-Mobile and Sprint together with roughly $92 million. The carriers had been fighting this since 2020.
- Airline-style individualized pricing for mobile phone plans? In May, Verizon's new CEO Dan Schulman floated the idea of moving beyond four customer segments to hundreds of thousands of them. Telecom analysts call this "segmentation." We call it “using your data to figure out the maximum amount you'll pay, and charging you exactly that.”
Meanwhile, at Cape
- Given the dismal state of privacy in telecom, we thought a privacy-first phone plan would be a useful thing to build. Fast Company agreed, naming Cape a winner from over 1,500 applicants for their World Changing Ideas award.
- Most Americans don't realize how exposed they are, but when they find out, they care. A Harris Poll commissioned by Cape found that when people are presented with the option of a more private carrier, a significant majority would consider switching.
- Cape CEO John Doyle was featured in:
- Founders Brew: Startup founders on the lessons they learned from military life
- Crossing the Valley: How Cape is building the American Huawei
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