Philippe Langlois, Founder & CEO of P1 Security, will present at the 25th general meeting of MAAWG, the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, in Berlin, Germany, 5 – 7 June 2012. Phil will deliver a presentation titled, “Telecom Signaling Security: Balancing protection levels in Core Networks from SS7 to LTE.”

From SMS spam to full-fledged fraud, Telecom is used to deal with Fraud and attacks, and to respond to these issues using Fraud Management Systems (FMS), antispam for SMSC and many other methods. Now, the landscape has changed. Attackers are becoming increasingly aggressive to the point where FMS and traditional anti-fraud systems are not efficient anymore and now use techniques that, if successful, could bring the telecom or mobile network operator to its knees. We’ve seen nationwide DoS and outages with targeted attacks on HLR or MSCs, crashed MGW, SS7 DoS at the SCCP, TCAP and MAP level, several down days of SMS service, crashed Network Elements due to faulty SIGTRAN stacks and even full dumps of SIM cards complete with IMSI and Ki available for sale in the underground forums.

These attacks are now everywhere, regardless of the technology, whether it Is legacy SS7, IMS or NGN network all the way to full IP with BICC, VoIP SIP with its many variants and RTP; up Femtocell access protocols and LTE S1AP, X2AP and Diameter. Everything boils down to facing attacks that you must prevent proactively, because if you’re vulnerable and they strike, you’re already as good as dead: service downtime, stolen data, improper access and increasingly disturbing creativity from attackers. The threat environment shows that the monetization of telecom-related vulnerabilities is mature and much more evolved than traditional stolen-VoIP resellers. We’ll see how we can make sure to address these problems before they occur and how to build an ecosystem that can provide an adapted response to these new and ever changing threats and attacks.