The state of GRX security

Late last year, documents from Edward Snowden’s NSA trove have revealed that Britain’s GCHQ has mounted a successful attack against Belgacom (the largest telecom in Belgium) and its subsidiary BICS (Belgacom International Carrier Services), a Global Roaming Exchange (GRX) provider. Other GRXs have been targeted as well.

But how easy is it to breach the systems of existing GRX providers? Stephen Kho and Rob Kuiters, penetration tester and incident response handler (respectively) in the CISO team of the Netherland’s largest telecoms provider KPN, have decided to check.

In this podcast recorded at Hack In The Box Amsterdam 2014, they explain what GRXs are, how they function, how vulnerable they are, and what their operators can do to secure them better.

Listen to the podcast here.

For in-depth technical details, check out their presentation slides.

Stephen Kho is a penetration tester within the CISO team at KPN. He has been a professional pentester for over 10 years and has experience in security testing across several domains including network infrastructure, VoIP, ICS/SCADA and web application.

Rob Kuiters works as an incident response handler in the CISO team at KPN. He has been involved in mobile networks from the very early start of GSM in the Netherlands. In 2007 he joined KPN-CERT as a technical mobile security specialist. The main focus of Rob’s work is currently still in mobile networking.