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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

#201

Post by 542354234235 »

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…

I suspect it was likely a multi-step process to actually get authorization to track a new phone and decrypt messages. For example:

>Step 1: Confirm known bad guy has phone through some other means.

>Step 2: Decrypt phone messages of known bad guy. Confirm they are criminal activities.

>Step 3: Note all previously unknown phones that exchanged criminal messages with known criminal.

>Step 4: Those phones are now considered belonging to known criminals. Return to Step 2.

Now, its totally possible they were just saying “someone bought a phone through TOR, they are probably bad so we can decrypt their messages” but that doesn’t have to be true for them to have worked their way through this criminal network.

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

#202

Post by foobar1962 »

Zenst wrote: post #157
femto wrote: post #43

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is covering it in more detail than the Reuters article, including some of the mechanics of how it was pulled off: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-08/fbi-afp-underworld-cr... Apparently it revolved around duping Hakan Ayik, one of Australia's most wanted drug dealers now operating as an international kingpin from Turkey, to trust the app and recommend it to his associates. I…

You have to respect this type of policing approach, the ironey is just delicious when you consider: 1) They socialy engineered their target just like scammers would 2) They got the target to install and trust some 3rd party app they supplied 3) Then the victim pyramid pushed the scam app onto others. We often read (1) and (2) all the time with various scams from call centres, now the law has used that approach agains…

> They got the target to install and trust some 3rd party app

I just heard on the radio (I’m an Aussie) that it’s not a phone app, it’s some kind if dedicated device that doesn’t do sms, mail or voice, only encrypted messages (that the law enforcement had the keys to).

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

#203

Post by saba2008 »

adriancr wrote: post #155
stef25 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Protip to the cartels - pay top dollar to some world class engineers to setup a dark web market and you'll make buckets. Most if not all markets until now have been run by geeks with limited knowledge and skills, wading in to the criminal underworld and inevitably making rookie mistakes. Both Ross and the guy in Bangkok had their personal emails tied to the markets. Some kids running a big market from Germany connect…

Setting up a dark web market is something most people would want to get anywhere close to... Imagine being responsible for facilitating murder-for-hire, sex trafficking and so on...

Imagine having employer, who has no qualms about killing people and for whom you are a loose end.

You need to be either professional criminal (skill set completely orthogonal to IT, so chance of somebody possessing both at professional level is miniscule), or a moron.

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

#204

Post by 542354234235 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #67
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.

> 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 Tradeoffs. Traditional tradecraft would inhibit such discovery methods. But it's slow and expensive. Your competitors would outmaneuv…

To add, we are just looking at one of a thousand aspects of tradecraft. They aren’t just dealing with this. They are dealing with moving goods, moving goods across borders, in person meetings, transferring money, recruiting new members, avoiding physical police bugs, avoiding police tails, securing good and money against other criminals, and on and on and on. Each one of those things has a learning curve and takes time, energy, and money.

Of course after a bust, you could go back and say “well obviously they should have done this differently and doubled their security here” but they can’t double their security everywhere and they can’t know every single possible way that every single aspect of everything could become compromised.

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

#205

Post by lm28469 »

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…

From what I read you could only buy/activate this phone(or app?) if you knew someone using one and they were only sold on the black market by people who knew the criminal organisations

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

#206

Post by pc86 »

yawaworht1978 wrote: post #181
stef25 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they got to this most wanted man and instead of arresting him they fed him an app to help catch all his buddies while at the same time put a target on his back? Pretty daring move.

I don't think that was the story.he fled to Cyprus and escaped prison there. Someone somehow got him to believe the app is safe, he took kickbacks for the distribution, even. My main question is, how is this man living free in Turkey despite there being an interpol warrant?

Living free in Turkey doesn't necessarily mean he isn't in hiding, and/or hasn't paid off enough locals to be protected from extradition or capture.

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

#208

Post by sorenjan »

dang wrote: post #91
femto wrote: post #43

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is covering it in more detail than the Reuters article, including some of the mechanics of how it was pulled off: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-08/fbi-afp-underworld-cr... Apparently it revolved around duping Hakan Ayik, one of Australia's most wanted drug dealers now operating as an international kingpin from Turkey, to trust the app and recommend it to his associates. I…

Ok, we'll change to that from https://www.reuters.com/article/australia-crime/australian-p... above. Thanks!

The Vice and the NYT articles are better, and of course there's a Wikipedia article about it. This article is too focused on the Australian part of the operation with too little detail about how it actually worked.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/akgkwj/operation-trojan-shie...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/world/australia/operation...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANOM_sting_operation

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

#209

Post by Zenst »

foobar1962 wrote: post #202
Zenst wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to respect this type of policing approach, the ironey is just delicious when you consider: 1) They socialy engineered their target just like scammers would 2) They got the target to install and trust some 3rd party app they supplied 3) Then the victim pyramid pushed the scam app onto others. We often read (1) and (2) all the time with various scams from call centres, now the law has used that approach agains…

> They got the target to install and trust some 3rd party app I just heard on the radio (I’m an Aussie) that it’s not a phone app, it’s some kind if dedicated device that doesn’t do sms, mail or voice, only encrypted messages (that the law enforcement had the keys to).

Oh that's even more delicious - it's like a modern version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes story or the drug dealers new phone in this instance - That the dealer was sold on the aspect that it would be invisible to the law. It just get's better and better.

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

#210

Post by m3kw9 »

femto wrote: post #43

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is covering it in more detail than the Reuters article, including some of the mechanics of how it was pulled off: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-08/fbi-afp-underworld-cr... Apparently it revolved around duping Hakan Ayik, one of Australia's most wanted drug dealers now operating as an international kingpin from Turkey, to trust the app and recommend it to his associates. I…

Can they actually just pin that on him just to get him? They need a scape goat and may as well
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