Operation Socialist is the code name given by the British signals and communications agency

Government Communications Headquarters Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is an intelligence and security organisation responsible for providing signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance (IA) to the government and armed forces of the United Kingdom. Primari ...

(GCHQ) to an operation in which GCHQ successfully breached the infrastructure of the Belgian telecommunications company Belgacom between 2010 and 2013. The operation's existence was first revealed in documents leaked by the former

National Security Agency The National Security Agency (NSA) is an intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the director of national intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collection, and proces ...

contractor

Edward Snowden Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is a former National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence contractor and whistleblower who leaked classified documents revealing the existence of global surveillance programs. Born in 1983 in Elizabeth ...

Objectives and methods

GCHQ used a method called Quantum Insert attack embedded in fake

LinkedIn LinkedIn () is an American business and employment-oriented Social networking service, social network. It was launched on May 5, 2003 by Reid Hoffman and Eric Ly. Since December 2016, LinkedIn has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft. ...

pages targeting Belgacom engineers. The breach was conducted under the code name 'OP Socialist'. The main target of the clandestine infiltration was to gain access to Belgacom's GRX Operator to enable GCHQ to obtain roaming data for mobile devices and execute what is generally referred to as

Man-in-the-middle attack In cryptography and computer security, a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack, or on-path attack, is a cyberattack where the attacker secretly relays and possibly alters the communications between two parties who believe that they are directly communi ...

against targets. When the first anomalies were detected in 2012, Belgacom's security team were unable to identify their cause. Only in 2013

malware Malware (a portmanteau of ''malicious software'')Tahir, R. (2018)A study on malware and malware detection techniques . ''International Journal of Education and Management Engineering'', ''8''(2), 20. is any software intentionally designed to caus ...

disguised as legitimate Microsoft software had been identified as the source of problems. According to the leaked documents GCHQ probed Belgacom's infrastructure for years. According to the leaked documents 'Operation Socialist' has been qualified by the head of the GCHQ's Network Analysis Centre as a success.

Reaction

Snowden subsequently described Operation Socialist as the "first documented example to show one EU member state mounting a cyber attack on another".

References

{{Reflist Proximus Group Cyberattacks GCHQ operations Intelligence agency programmes revealed by Edward Snowden Secret government programs Belgium–United Kingdom relations