Belgacom has said that it was hit by a suspected APT attack which, according to leaked documents from NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden and published by German newspaper Der Spiegel, was the work of the NSA and UK’s own GCHQ.
Called project ‘Operation Socialist’, the leaked slides revealed how the attack was used to target Belgacom subsidiary Bics, a joint venture between Swisscom and South Africa’s MTN. The agencies allegedly used an attack method called ‘quantum injection’, more commonly known as a Man-in-the-Middle attack, to intercept web traffic and redirect LinkedIn-using Belgacom engineers onto their own servers.
“The Belgacom employees probably thought nothing was amiss when they pulled up their profiles on LinkedIn,” reported Der Spiegel at the time. “The pages looked the way they always did, and they didn’t take any longer than usual to load.”
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