USA-based Syniverse, a company that routes billions of text messages of major US carriers such as Verizon, T-Mobile, etc, and which also lists Airtel as its customer, in a regulatory filing declared that it suffered a hack of its internal systems from 2016 to 2021. On September 27, the company in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), said, "In May 2021, Syniverse became aware of unauthorized access to its operational and information technology systems by an unknown individual or organization. Promptly upon Syniverse's detection of the unauthorized access, Syniverse launched an internal investigation, notified law enforcement, commenced remedial actions and engaged the services of specialized legal counsel and other incident response professionals." Before going into the details of the hack, let's start at the beginning — What exactly does Syniverse do? According to this article by The Verge, among other functions, Syniverse is responsible for handling billions of texts of major telcos in the US. For instance, if an AT&T customer wants to send a message to the same carrier, then it can be done directly. However, the need for a third party comes when the message has to be sent from one telecom carrier to the other. "A third-party company needs to take on the work of translating (one carrier's) message into the (other's) protocol, and physically routing it from one network to the other," the report by The Verge said. Syniverse works as the third party and it delivers 600 billion messages every month,…
