Citizen Lab Details How Iran Exploits Cellular Network Vulnerabilities to Track US Military Personnel

Citizen Lab senior fellow Gary Miller said SS7 mobile-network exploits, publicly documented for fifteen years, were used to track US military personnel during the Iran war 1. The Financial Times reported that Middle East telecom networks faced a wave of SS7 location-pinging attempts against US personnel and contractors from the buildup to the US-Israeli strikes on Iran in late February through the war's early days, with data from the Mobile Surveillance Monitor project, reviewed by two cybersecurity experts, pointing to a coordinated campaign 2. Gulf officials suspected Iran or its allies exploited local roaming agreements, while a separate US official said Iran-linked actors abused commercial ad-tech databases to track phones in Iraqi Kurdistan 2. Miller told the FT that some blocked tracking attempts traced to a single Iranian carrier, forming a fingerprint indicating specific-device targeting; CENTCOM had told Congress in April it received multiple threat reports of adversaries exploiting commercial location data to target US personnel and separately said it took unspecified "unprecedented force-protection measures," while a separate US official disputed that tracking played a significant role in attacks on US forces 2.