BPI sees rise in IMSI catcher

THE Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) has seen an increase in International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) catcher this year as bad actors’ new preferred fraud method.

“We saw that the type of scams in terms of their complexity and the use of technology really several notches above what they were just a year ago. And a lot of the sophistication came from the new technologies that were harnessed to enable these scams,” BPI Enterprise Information Security Officer and Data Protection Officer Jonathan John B. Paz said in a media briefing on Wednesday.

IMSI catchers can intercept data and track phone location by mimicking legitimate telecommunication cell towers and tricks nearby phones into connecting to the tool instead of a tower.

“Not everyone has that know-how to distinguish fake texts coming from an IMSI capture and then be able to have it, to recognize what it is and then be able to report it. So that’s something that is particularly worrisome. And the thing is, unfortunately, the telcos do not have an effective antidote yet,” Mr. Paz said.

While industry players are already working with the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) to combat these, Mr. Paz said it could be harder for telcos to address this.

“The traffic between the IMSI gadgets and the mobile device are local. Meaning they don’t go through the telco networks. So the telcos don’t have the opportunity to detect the traffic coming from IMSI catchers,” he said. — Aaron Michael C. Sy