Edward Snowden has claimed that the US and UK government security agencies have been accessing SIM cards to monitor mobile communications, and now Gemalto has opened an investigation of those claims. Gemalto is the world’s largest maker of SIM cards. Snowden claims the NSA and its UK counterpart hacked Gemalto’s network and stole SIM card encryption keys so that they could monitor cellular communications without accessing the cellular network. Gemalto ships more than a billion SIM cards a year to the mobile operators who put them into smartphones.
According to documents that Snowden shared with The Intercept, Great Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) intercepted communications of Gemalto’s engineering team in order to gain access to the encryption keys. The US National Security Agency reportedly helped the GCHQ.
Gemalto told The Intercept that its key concern now is for its telecom customers. The company said it wants to make sure the alleged security breach has no impact on its customers, and that right now it is trying to understand what may have happened, and prevent it from happening again.