A profile of Andreas Fink, a Swiss telecom expert whose services let state agencies, like Israeli disinformation unit Team Jorge, attack phone networks globally
The international mobile system is exposed and a loophole allows hackers, cybercriminals and states to geolocate targets and even hijack email and web accounts. Mastodon: @jsrailton@mastodon.social . Tweets: @avischarf , @rondeibert , @evacide , and @avischarf Mastodon: John Scott-Railton / @jsrailton@mastodon.social : NEW: Assange ally who once processed payments for #WikiLeaks now masterminds a global phone #surveillance system. — A new report says Andreas Fink (he's apparently on Mastodon: @afink ) helps shady actors & governments track phones, intercept texts & compromise accounts. … Tweets: Avi Scharf / @avischarf : We saw attempts to extract location info frm phones in Afr, Asia and EU + harvesting IMSIs - needed for more sophisticated surveil Some instances show active capabilities- like intercepting 2f authentication SMSes used to secure sensitive personal accounts https://www.haaretz.com/... https://twitter.com/... @rondeibert : The secretive Swiss dealer enabling Israeli spy firms to exploit loopholes in the international mobile system to geolocate targets More excellent reporting by @LHreports @cr0ft0n @omerbenj on SS7 vulnerabilities https://www.haaretz.com/... Eva / @evacide : SS7 attacks: they're not the same as surveillance malware but they're still very bad. https://twitter.com/... Avi Scharf / @avischarf : On recent trip DRC Fink performed a demo, showed how 2 locate person behind anonymous FB account, which intel officials said was “used for defamation and spreading misinfo” about the gov He successfully located the POI but wasn't sure what happened to them https://www.haaretz.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Fink is not an anomaly but a named node in a documented market. The Citizen Lab already traced how Circles' SS7 snooping tools reached 25 nations, several with human-rights abuse records, establishing that access to the international mobile signaling system is something states buy rather than build. The Haaretz profile adds a layer below the vendors: an individual broker whose public demonstration — locating the person behind an anonymous Facebook account in the DRC — functions as both proof of capability and marketing.
That individual-custodian pattern recurs across the corpus: the [[a:841708|cottage industry of oligarch-linked Russian contractors building surveillance tools for the FSB]] and Viktor Vedeneev's FSB-linked control of Telegram server infrastructure both show single engineers sitting astride critical communications layers. Naming Fink matters because it converts an abstract 'loophole' story into a traceable supply chain.
First-order effects
- Targets — dissidents, journalists, anyone relying on SMS two-factor codes — face immediate exposure to geolocation, text interception, and email/web account hijacking through the signaling loophole, while Team Jorge gets turnkey reach into foreign phone networks without operating any telecom infrastructure itself.
- Researchers like John Scott-Railton and Avi Scharf gain a specific individual and service structure to investigate, moving the accountability question from anonymous tooling to a named Swiss expert who has demonstrated these capabilities publicly.
Second-order effects
- Mobile operators and the industry bodies governing inter-carrier signaling come under renewed pressure to close SS7-class loopholes, since every unpatched weakness is convertible into a commercial service the moment someone like Fink packages it.
- Other intelligence agencies can skip years of internal capability-building by purchasing the same access, repeating the diffusion pattern seen when Circles placed its tools in the hands of dozens of national clients.
Third-order effects
- If individual brokers stay the distribution channel, SMS-based authentication loses credibility as a security baseline, pushing platforms and financial services toward app-based verification regardless of how fast carriers patch signaling.
- Export-control regimes built around surveillance companies strain against lone experts whose services cross borders and customers — regulators may need to target individuals and the custodians of core network infrastructure, not just incorporated vendors.
The trend: State surveillance is consolidating around a brokerage model in which individual telecom experts rent out access to core network vulnerabilities instead of governments developing the capability in-house.