As cellular networks move from 3G and 4G to the faster 5G networks, it is crucial for them to launch their services as soon as possible in order to justify the billions of dollars of investments they have made in buying the 5G spectrums, infrastructure and equipment, said Ofir Zemer, the CEO of the 8-year-old company.

“5G is a big issue in mobile networks. Everyone wants to accelerate their 5G deployment because mobile carriers believe that 5G will have a great impact on their consumers and enterprise customers, and will allow them to generate new revenue streams.”

Cellwize software allows mobile operators to automatically launch the 5G networks with very little manual intervention.

“Deploying a mobile network is a very complex process, predominantly manual process, where someone needs to configure the network elements in a way that the network will now work. We are equipment agnostic. That is the beauty.”

The company initially provided software to deploy previous-generation networks. It has now transitioned its technology to cater for 5G networks. Competitors who have developed similar software to help deploy 5G networks include Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei, he said. But their software works only with their own 5G infrastructure equipment, and most carriers generally use equipment from a variety of vendors, Zemer said.

5G networks are very complex networks to operate – with tens of thousands of towers that need to be deployed to provide stable communications coverage. Intel is a very large provider of chipsets for mobile networks, said Zemer.

“With Cellwize’s platform, which contains AI capabilities, on top of Intel’s chipsets, the mobile operator can deploy and manage their 5G faster and better.”

A chipset is a set of electronic components in an integrated circuit. The accord will enable Intel’s chipsets to be “powered by Cellwize,” he added. The contract with Intel is for “potentially millions of dollars,” he said. There is no exclusivity, and Cellwize is also selling its software to 30 companies including Dell, Verizon, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom and Israel’s Partner Communications, he added.

The collaboration with Intel will allow operators to deploy their 5G networks “more quickly, with a fully automated process, up to 90% reduction in associated costs, improved quality of services through automation, reduced operating expenses to configure and activate cell sites, and overall enhanced customer satisfaction through AI-driven and predictive decision making,” Cellwize said in a statement.

In the new process, an Angular team member will review a ticket manually and identify it as either a feature request or an issue. After that, the Angular team will verify whether feature requests align with existing projects on the roadmap and see whether to prioritize them or not.

If a feature request collects enough votes within the 60-day window, the bot will automatically mark it down for consideration. Angular is also considering requests with 20 or more votes and iterating if a different number of votes will get better results.

The team will then manually review it again and see if it matches up with Angular’s future vision, and if it does, it will move it to its prioritization queue. If it doesn’t, Angular will close it with an explanation and determine whether the feature is a better fit for an external module that the community can distribute as part of the platform. Minko Gechev wrote in a blog post:

“Although tempting, it’s unrealistic and unhealthy to incorporate all the requests for features. If Angular takes this path, there are risks for the framework becoming unlearnable and unmaintainable. But clearly, such feedback is precious — there are hundreds of bright ideas coming from the community that align well with Angular’s future vision and are worth exploring.

He also commented that by actively closing more feature requests, they set better expectations and make it clear that they are trying to focus on the work that impacts the largest number of developers.

The leaked data includes Facebook ID numbers, profile names, email addresses, location information, gender details, job data, and anything else users might have entered in their profiles.

Photo Credit: The Record

The data is currently being offered in 106 separate download packages, with the data split on a per-country basis.

While the forum is publicly accessible and anyone can register a profile, the download links for these packages are only available to users who bought forum credits. Reached out for comment, Facebook confirmed the leak, which occurred two years ago according to the company. A Facebook spokesperson commented:

“This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019. We found and fixed this issue in August 2019.”

At the time, an attacker abused a vulnerability in the Facebook contacts importer feature to supply the Facebook platform with a list of phone numbers and get a match for existing profiles, allowing the attacker to link random phone numbers to specific users. The attacker collected data in 2019, until Facebook detected the automated process, and cut off their access.

While the data appears to have been sold in private, it was also used as the backend of a Telegram bot launched in January 2021 that allowed anyone to retrieve the phone number and account details for Facebook users for a small fee.

With the data now entering the public domain, there is a real danger that this information will now be widely disseminated across low-skilled cybercriminals that may abuse it for email or SMS spam, robocalls, extortion attempts, threats, harassment, and more.

Below is a breakdown of the data, per country, as provided by the leaker.