China may have found a backdoor to track the phones of Americans traveling abroad, exploiting signals from phone networks in the Caribbean to potentially track U.S. phones and intercept their messages.
Gary Miller, a Washington state-based former mobile network security executive, described China’s surveillance behavior in an interview with The Guardian, it reported Tuesday.
Miller said he believes China has routed mobile signaling messages through Cable & Wireless Communications (Flow) in Barbados and Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BTC) to primarily target U.S. mobile users traveling abroad.
Phone users are not aware of the the signaling messages being sent to their mobile devices, but telecoms operators across the global network use these messages to locate mobile phones, link mobile phone users to one another and assess roaming charges. Miller told the Guardian that these signaling messages can also be used for more nefarious purposes, including allowing China to track, monitor, or intercepting mobile phone users communications. The potential misuse of signaling messages is a decades-old vulnerability for mobile networks, according to the Guardian.