A Telstra-owned mobile phone operator in the Pacific Islands has likely been used by private spy firms to track people on the other side of the world and steal their data, according to expert cybersecurity analysis.

Digicel Pacific's network resources appear to have been exploited to target unsuspecting mobile phone users in Africa in a type of attack that has been used in the past by spy-for-hire operations and state actors, according to analysis by the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab shared with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and the ABC.

Using data from the Mobile Surveillance Monitor project, Citizen Lab found that actors who are most likely private spies-for-hire have been attacking phones around the world by leasing or otherwise gaining the use of "global titles" belonging to Digicel Pacific.

Global titles are a kind of address on 3G networks, which can be used to send queries to phones connected to mobile providers anywhere on earth, said Gary Miller, a research fellow at Citizen Lab.

Once spy operations have obtained a global title and registered it on international phone networks, they can run their attacks using free software and hardware that costs as little as $200.

The latest analysis shows that Digicel Pacific global titles from five countries — Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Tonga, and Vanuatu — were used to lodge over 21,000 suspicious queries in the 12 months to July this year.

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