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"Never use hotel internet if you want to do a secure call:" How spies listened in on German general (www.bbc.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Four German military officials discussed what targets German-made Taurus missiles could potentially hit if Chancellor Olaf Scholz ever allowed them to be sent to Kyiv, and the call had been intercepted by Russian intelligence.

According to German authorities, the "data leak" was down to just one participant dialling in on an insecure line, either via his mobile or the hotel wi-fi.

The exact mode of dial-in is "still being clarified", Germany has said.

"I think that's a good lesson for everybody: never use hotel internet if you want to do a secure call," Germany's ambassador to the UK, Miguel Berger, told the BBC this week. Some may feel the advice came a little too late.

Eyebrows were raised when it emerged the call happened on the widely-used WebEx platform - but Berlin has insisted the officials used an especially secure, certified version.

Professor Alan Woodward from the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security says that WebEx does provide end-to-end encryption "if you use the app itself".

But using a landline or open hotel wi-fi could mean security was no longer guaranteed - and Russian spies, it's now supposed, were ready to pounce.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago (4 children)

How is it possible to accomplish a man in the middle attack on a TLS secure connection ? Hotel wifi or not, unless something major like Singaporean gov interfered with the connection, forced forged certificates into his phone, I don't see how this was put off by compromising the connection .

I bet they are covering for the Fact that one of them has downloaded malware into his device to masturbate to a hot girl living next to him kinda ad. and then malware shared back that data to Russia. or they have a spy among them and Germany isn't ready to admit having its defense forces compromised with Russian assets.

[–] bluemellophone 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The easiest explanation is the room was bugged and the general stayed there.

[–] Maggoty 4 points 9 months ago

Everyone forgets the old school stuff. It doesn't matter how well your connection is encrypted if the GRU has the room next to you.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

they were using an insecure method to connect with webex, so something like a dial-in number for using it without a computer i guess. that is probably not encrypted. the meeting could have been a fax anyway

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

Do you think Webex doesn't reject insecure connections ? it is the bare minimum for any web app.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

but the audio in the hands of the Russians sounds crystal clear! and you can hear all the participants very clearly, which means it has been captured from one of the involved devices.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

not sure how they would check a landline call for security 🤷

[–] Maggoty 1 points 9 months ago

All the data goes to the man in the middle. Worse, there's nothing stopping a user from connecting for other things. So a man in the middle can act like a trusted source while sending malware to the device. If they compromised the phone/computer then the encrypted tunnel is moot. It has to be decrypted at some point, even if the malware literally just creates a recording.

[–] Passerby6497 1 points 9 months ago

TLS means dick if you have a nation-state that can mint a cert that would be trusted by your browser. Unless you're using a site that does cert pinning (which is basically a list your browser has of URLs and expected cert fingerprints as published by the site owners) or the fuckery that Google gets up to in chrome (they monitor and immediately ping the mother ship if a Google property is detected using an unauthorized cert), you can't really stop or detect it as an end user.

Your computer trusts so many companies to vouch for other sites' legitimacy that it's not out of the realm of possibilities that they leaned on a CA and minted a cert to let them MITM the connection. You're still connecting to a "trusted" cert, even if it isn't the legitimate one.