According to the Associated Press and Reuters, both of which have published an expose about a cyberespionage campaign that might have its origins in Beijing, hackers turned a telecom giant into a "global spy system." Cybereason Chief Executive Lior Div said because customers weren't directly targeted, they might never discover that their every movement was being monitored by a hostile power.

According to ZeroHedge, the AP, which sourced its story from a presentation given by the head of Cybereason, a global cybersecurity contractor brought in by telecoms firms to trace the source of another potentially major breach, a group of possibly state-backed hackers infiltrated the system of an unnamed telecoms giant to spy on a group of unnamed "VIPs" call records, location data and other information. The hack essentially allowed those hackers to track the movements and activities of the targets. And because the hack occurred at the service-provider level, it would be virtually impossible for the 20 or so end-user targets to discover the breach on their own. In essence, the hackers were able to transform the targeted firm into a "global surveillance system."

"The hackers have turned the affected telecoms into 'a global surveillance system,'" Div said in a telephone interview. "Those individuals don't know they were hacked – because they weren't." Div, who presented his findings at the Cyber Week conference in Tel Aviv, provided scant details about who was targeted in the hack. He said Cybereason had been called in to help an unidentified cellular provider last year and discovered that the hackers had broken into the firm's billing server,where call records are logged. The hackers were using their access to extract the data of "around 20" customers, Div said.