Thailand’s AIS had recently issued a press release with Gemalto on its NFC-enabled SIM cards for payments. One of its executives responded that AIS uses SIM cards from a number of suppliers, not just Gemalto.
Singapore’s StarHub said, “We are not aware of any breach of privacy for StarHub customers, but we will be working with our SIM card supplier to clarify this matter.”
Both Singtel and Optus said that they were still investigating the matter.
Many others did not get back with an answer in time of going to press.
Gemalto only had a automated reply saying their media contact being on holiday until the 23rd.
Following the report that showed redacted slides and documents, infosec activist and Der Spiegel regular Jacob Applebaum and TheIntercept’s Glenn Greenwald who was the first to break the Edward Snowden story played out an interesting conversation on Twitter as to the rights and wrongs of censoring the names of the GCHQ spies involved in the operation.
Greenwald defended the decision to black out the names identifying the operatives saying that it would not accomplish anything and would only result in low-level people being prosecuted as scapegoats while those giving orders remained above the law.
The great GCHQ SIM heist rounded up a torrid week for security professionals. On Monday the NSA hard drive firmware implant was exposed by Kaspersky Labs that allowed the spy agency control of PCs even across operating system re-installs. Tuesday saw a bug in FreeBSD’s random-number-generator that would have compromised the SSL encryption of many web servers running the operating system; and Wednesday saw the Superfish SSL man-in-the-middle root certificate attack that was pre-loaded onto Lenovo PCs.