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.
You don’t even need a VPN if the software uses proper TLS encryption or equivalent
TLS downgrade attacks are a thing, and can enable MITM attacks. There are server-side mitigations (such as only allowing TLS 1.2+ which should be the case but often isn’t because the server has to support a niche user or application that only supports TLS 1.1), and since you usually don’t know which TLS version you are using, for very sensitive connections it should be assumed that TLS is not enough.
Don’t even get me started on the non-security of standard mobile/landline calls. They’re basically transparent for an attacker with means like Russia’s.
Proper E2E encryption and/or a VPN should be mandatory for a call to be considered secure, period.
If WebEx is susceptible to MITM attacks, it shouldn’t be used for sensitive calls. It’s better to use a VPN, but something like this should not happen at all, even without VPNs.
Sure, but when you demonstrably don’t have a handle on E2E encryption using a VPN should be the FIRST step because it is very easy to implement, secure, and enforce. Virtually every private company does it.
Conversely E2E encryption is hard, lots of popular apps disable it by default or in some cases because it breaks a lot of useful things (like search). I agree it SHOULD still be mandated, but it’s several orders of magnitude more expensive to switch the communication tool than mandating a VPN so for me that immediately pushes it second to VPN on the priority list.
I like the American option. We just built an entire second Internet and air-gapped it.