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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow3941

A hacker has provided Motherboard with the login details for a company that buys phone location data from major telecom companies and then sells it to law enforcement.

A hacker has broken into the servers of Securus, a company that allows law enforcement to easily track nearly any phone across the country, and which a US Senator has exhorted federal authorities to investigate. The hacker has provided some of the stolen data to Motherboard, including usernames and poorly secured passwords for thousands of Securus' law enforcement customers.

Although it's not clear how many of these customers are using Securus's phone geolocation service, the news still signals the incredibly lax security of a company that is granting law enforcement exceptional power to surveill individuals.

"Location aggregators are—from the point of view of adversarial intelligence agencies—one of the juiciest hacking targets imaginable," Thomas Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University, told Motherboard in an online chat.

Last week, the New York Times reported that Securus obtains phone location data from major telcos, such as AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon, and then makes this available to its customers. The system by which Securus obtains the data is typically used by marketers, but Securus provides a product for law enforcement to track phones in the US nationwide with little legal oversight, the report adds. In one case, a former sheriff of Mississippi County, Mo., used the Securus service to track other law enforcement official's phones, according to court records.

Source: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gykgv9/securus-phone-tracking-company-hacked

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