Hi and welcome to Sabirism's malicious life. I'm Ran Levy.

Two years ago in July 2019 we released a special episode titled Operation Soft Cell.

In it I told the story of how researchers from Cyber Reasons

Nocturnous Research Team uncovered a massive espionage

campaign against some of the world's largest telecommunications companies by APT10, a Chinese state-sponsored cyber espionage group.

APT10 used a variety of tools to infiltrate these

telco's networks, or CDRs. These records hold meta information about phone calls

by the telco's customers customers such as the source and destination phone numbers,

geographic locations of the devices and more. Soft Cell was an extremely

targeted attack. In one case, for example, records of only some 20 individuals were

exfiltrated. We can only guess their identities. Leaders, journalists, dissidents? Who knows? A few days ago, in early August of

2021, Sabriason released a new report, this time titled Operation Dead Ringer. Rehn

released a new report this time titled Operation Dead Ringer

detailing a new massive espionage campaign targeting major telcos

as usual we took advantage of the fact that Cyberreason is our show's sponsor to get a rare inside

look at how exactly that campaign was uncovered.

Nate Nelson, our senior producer, spoke with Asaf-Dahan, senior director and head of threat research at Cyber reasons noctonus team.

As usual, I'll step in once in a while to provide you with background information and context where

needed.

Enjoy the interview.

Asaf, let's just start with you briefly introducing who you are.

Hi, Nate, thanks for having me.

...