Virgin Media O2

History

2025: Geolocation of customers has been leaking to criminals for years

British telecom operator Virgin Media O2 for two years provided data on the location and movement of its subscribers to everyone who required it. There was a huge breach in the operator's security system, which he did not see or patch until May 18, 2025. Virgin Media O2 is one of the largest telecom operators in the world with more than 45 million subscribers.

According to The Guardian, tens of millions of people were at risk of surveillance - Virgin Media O2 is one of the largest telecom operators in the world, having 45.8 million subscribers of cellular communications, home telephony and the Internet according to its official statistics. The larger the settlement, the more accurately the operator helped determine the location of the required subscriber.

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Фото: Freepik

Virgin Media O2 has been operating since 2021 and is a joint venture between operators Virgin Media and O2. In other words, he helped to monitor his subscribers during half of his existence. The operator did this against his will due to a huge vulnerability in his system, which experts did not notice or eliminate.

Any Virgin Media O2 SIM card holder could use their phone to obtain confidential information about other network customers using the 4G-enabled device. This included their location with respect to the nearest mobile tower. Since 4G is one of the most common cellular networks in the world, as are devices with their support, surveillance could be really massive.

The vulnerability was fixed and brought to the attention of British communications and data protection regulators. Virgin Media O2 said there was no evidence its network security systems had been hacked from outside.

Disabling the 4G call feature on devices would prevent them from being tracked, although this is not possible on some phones, such as iPhones. The issue could also affect some customers of Giffgaff and Tesco Mobile subscribers who use Virgin Media's O2 network.

IT specialist Dan Williams was able to identify the problem. When he discovered her, he reached out to the operator and was "extremely disappointed" to receive no response, he said. After waiting for some time, Williams spoke about the "hole" in the operator's system to the whole world, publishing a corresponding article in his personal blog.^[1]

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