Mitto AG finds itself in the middle of a global spying business
Mitto AG is a private company that has partnerships with over 100 telecom operators across the world.
Mitto AG, which assisted technology behemoths such as Google, WhatsApp, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Telegram with OTP services, is now involved in a global spying business. According to a report by the London-based nonprofit The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), Ilja Gorelik, the company’s co-founder and chief operating officer, provided services to surveillance companies such as “selling access to Mitto’s networks to secretly locate people via their mobile phones.” Employees and whistleblowers at Mitto revealed that the company’s own networks were also used for surveillance. The report stated that the surveillance firms involved in Mitto’s business were contracted to work with government agencies, but it did not reveal their identities.
Mitto AG, headquartered in Zug, Switzerland, is a private company with global partnerships with over 100 telecom operators. According to the TBIJ report, the Swiss company used mobile phone networks to locate people and possibly intercept messages via the SS7 protocol. Telecom networks all over the world use SS7 infrastructure to communicate while calls and text messages are routed from one network to another. The report also mentioned at least one incident in which a US State Department official was targeted with a flurry of signalling using Mitto’s network to locate the device’s location. The information obtained from Mitto AG’s network, when combined with other modern surveillance technologies on the market, could make device interception much easier.
The company has expressed shock and distanced itself from its founder’s surveillance business. “The allegations levelled against Ilja Gorelik and our company astound us. To be clear, Mitto does not, has not, and will not organise and operate a separate business, division, or entity that allows surveillance companies access to telecom infrastructure in order to secretly locate people via their mobile phones, or engage in other illegal activities. Mitto also does not condone, support, or facilitate the exploitation of telecom networks with which it collaborates to provide services to its global customers “Mitto AG issued a statement.
SMS-based services are used by technology companies such as Google, Twitter, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, and Telegram for user verification, password retrieval, and security checks. Hosting infrastructure for a global user base is an expensive operation for technology companies, and aggregators like Mitto AG provide a much lower cost solution.
