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Australian Federal Police and FBI nab underworld figures using encrypted app

abc.net.au

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Re: Australian Federal Police and FBI nab underworld figures using encrypted app

#161

Post by donalhunt »

cromka wrote: post #70

What we've learned is only what was in Austrlia's piece of the cake, given they started their day already. New Zeland had theirs already, too. I imagine thousands of arrests are still happening worldwide and several press conferences are going to be held today. Looking at the seal of the operation ( https://www.anom.io/trojan_shield_seal.jpg ), following countries participated in the operation: Canada, Australia, US,…

Europol press conference is available for playback now at https://youtu.be/e443mE8l-_0

There is another press conference at 09:00 PDT too (FBI I believe).

Side note: Scotland is recognised separately from the UK in the list of participating countries. ;)

Re: Australian Federal Police and FBI nab underworld figures using encrypted app

#162

Post by kryptiskt »

stef25 wrote: post #148
walrus01 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I was a US intelligence agency I would specifically establish colocation presences with ISPs in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, china, etc, on commercial ISP terms, and admin the servers remotely to set them up as a commercial vpn service. There's plenty of datacenter operators in Russia that will take your money.

> There's plenty of datacenter operators in Russia that will take your money. Wouldn't they have some uncomfortable questions to answer when Putin finds out they've been cooperating with the Feds?

Presumably the feds wouldn't say who they were and would pose as common criminals, because they wouldn't have any reason to suppose that the datacenter operator would keep quiet if they were open about their identity.

Re: Australian Federal Police and FBI nab underworld figures using encrypted app

#163

Post by lazyasciiart »

rbobby wrote: post #158

I find this a bit concerning. Catching bad guys is all well and good but I wonder whether the various governments are overreaching. Selling a bugged phone to a known criminal is likely fine (cite: The Wire). But is it acceptable to sell a bugged phone to unknown/unidentified/random people and then use the phone's communications to determine if the owner is a crook and the owner's identity? The sole basis of suspicion…

Yes, and the court documents released include FBI reasoning based on previous sampling of users showing that the people who bought these phones were criminals. They're not ordinary phones, and distribution is intentionally limited. Drug smugglers don't want to let just anybody buy a phone for their encrypted network, you know

Re: Australian Federal Police and FBI nab underworld figures using encrypted app

#164

Post by upofadown »

turbinerneiter wrote: post #127

I'm happy they are catching criminals, but now I wonder how many of my encryption and privacy software is actually an FBI front.

That is why effective end to end encryption is so important. It doesn't matter who is behind it. That is the whole point. No trust required.

Re: Australian Federal Police and FBI nab underworld figures using encrypted app

#165

Post by lazyasciiart »

stef25 wrote: post #156
senectus1 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

from what I understand they developed the app themselves... marketed and pushed the app to certain "dark markets" and let them use the apps and devices as if they were secure. they were in fact real time monitoring every transaction. amazing really. and pretty funny if you asked me :-P

If I present some device to my local street dealer and tell him to "use this it's secure I swear" he'll probably punch me cause he suspects a trap. Amazing that these "world class" criminals fall for this stuff.

Not if you're his supplier. This whole thing works on pre-existing connections.

Re: Australian Federal Police and FBI nab underworld figures using encrypted app

#166

Post by 9wzYQbTYsAIc »

mdoms wrote: post #135
cromka wrote: post #70

What we've learned is only what was in Austrlia's piece of the cake, given they started their day already. New Zeland had theirs already, too. I imagine thousands of arrests are still happening worldwide and several press conferences are going to be held today. Looking at the seal of the operation ( https://www.anom.io/trojan_shield_seal.jpg ), following countries participated in the operation: Canada, Australia, US,…

I think you're drawing an extremely long bow on this.

Qantas was just implicated as being corrupted from within, complaining that no one had told them who or what corruption until the day before this was announced.

There isn’t much of a stretch of the imagination required to see that there is a deep rabbit hole that just got filled with cement.

Re: Australian Federal Police and FBI nab underworld figures using encrypted app

#167

Post by usrusr »

fvold wrote: post #133
rohanstake wrote: post #54

Good that they arrested the culprits. But infiltrating the encrypted messaging app isn't the best thing I guess. The argument, it is used by criminals is flawed. Because everything is - water pipelines, cash, facebook, and so on.

This was specifically seeded into the criminal world. It's not like they cracked Signal, or whatever. It's not an infiltration of the app, it's an infiltration of the criminal organizations, using an app they made.

Makes me wonder if "invite only" could eventually be read as a red flag indicating possible honeypot? Guess no secret tool is forever.

Re: Australian Federal Police and FBI nab underworld figures using encrypted app

#168

Post by Synaesthesia »

One day we will realise the war on drugs was mostly destructive to ordinary people. It's important to realise the US has historically played a huge role in the global drug trade, and that really stopping the drug trade means going after banking executives, politicians and chemical corporations. However that is never done.

Re: Australian Federal Police and FBI nab underworld figures using encrypted app

#170

Post by 9wzYQbTYsAIc »

cylde_frog wrote: post #16
michaelmrose wrote: post #9

Does anyone find it funny that each criminal group could have been better off relying on a "kid who knows computers" level of expertise and bog standard devices running open source software which at least wouldn't be trivially systematically turned against them all at once quite so easily.

I wonder about this too. What sort of people do international criminal organisations hire to manage their info-sec? A criminal that became a computer expert or a computer expert that became a criminal?

From 2003, an inside look at the mafia IT: https://www.wired.com/2003/12/mafia/
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