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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

#221

Post by [deleted] »

simondotau wrote: post #174
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing wrong with inhibiting growth in return for long term stability For long-term plans to pay off, they must survive a series of short terms. Criminal gangs and dictators don’t ignore the long term because they’re stupid. They ignore them because they must. A drug gang practicing classical tradecraft would be decimated by one coördinating electronically. The latter will be caught faster. But a series of short-t…

I can't help but imagine that what you're describing are the criminal gangs we know about; the ones which are well documented. If there are criminal gangs which we don't know about, that aren’t well documented, perhaps they're better at maintaining long term stability.

[deleted]

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

#222

Post by tcbasche »

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.

maybe read the article ;)

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

#223

Post by specialist »

janmo wrote: post #182

I've been reading a lot about these "encrypted phones recently". What really shocks me is how in the last years police has been going after operators of such services under the premise that they would help criminals. - Sky ECC (Shutdown, owner is facing criminal charges) - Phantom Secure (Shutdown and owner got 9 years in prison) - Encrochat ("Hacked" by french police) So it seems like those "Encrypted phones" were v…

> I think that criminal organizations will now rely on a do it yourself technique.

Ya, acknowledging the role of compromised encryption feels like burning their source.

Speculation: Churchhill chose to let Coventry get bombed rather than disclose that German encryption had been cracked.

Wouldn't the long game be to allow criminals to believe their communications remain secure, for law enforcement to do parallel construction for their cases?

I can't imagine the calculus that goes into these decisions.

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

#224

Post by csunbird »

Nextgrid wrote: post #146
flukus wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the criminal organizations can offer a whole range of addictive non-monetary incentives that a computer expert may desire, so I'd guess that's the main path in. There's more unemployed tech people out there than many here realize though. People that don't present well in interviews, people that didn't stay employ-ably current in tech, hardware guys replaced by the cloud, people in less hot locations for tech, et…

In some countries, getting into tech is impossible if you're not lucky to have the right credentials. In France for example, any even remotely technical job will require years of higher education and experience (yes there's an obvious catch-22 here). You can have perfectly serviceable skills that would put you at a junior/mid developer or sysadmin level and be completely unemployable - at this point crime doesn't sou…

Tbh, illegality aside, creating a very highly secure system like this from scratch as an one or two person project sounds very exciting and fun.

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

#225

Post by emc3 »

dash2 wrote: post #152
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,…

Hee hee! The parent domain now has a useful form for criminals to turn themselves in with: https://www.anom.io/ "To determine if your account is associated with an ongoing investigation, please enter any device details below:" and then it asks for your username, country and IMEI....

Honey pot?

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

#226

Post by emc3 »

542354234235 wrote: post #200
kryptiskt wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But yours assumes that Russia doesn't do counter-intel and wouldn't be looking for exactly these kinds of infiltrations. If it is obvious to us that these things would be targets, I'm pretty sure it is obvious to Russian intelligence services.

Shady fly by night data hosting doing counter-intel, or better, Putin spending his precious rubles on running counter-intel ops for shady fly by night hosting companies, are both hilarious.

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

#227

Post by xtracto »

spicyramen wrote: post #65

Can't find the article but Mexican drug cartels hired Cisco certified experts to setup their encrypted communications. Not just your average CCNA guy from test king, but industry experts working for Service Providers and Government.

If by "hired" you mean kidnapped and made them decide between killing their families and them or paying them to secure their networks then you are correct.

Drug cartels over here are terrible.

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

#228

Post by sfifs »

janmo wrote: post #212
xwolfi wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It s not that they were so effective that police forces got scared of them, it's that the ratio criminals vs normal users is so high that it's a no brainer to spend a few millions on hacking/infiltrating them to collect a huge reward. Whatsapp or Telegram which your grandma uses would be very low reward compared to amount of conversations to parse.

Makes me wonder if those aren't already compromised.

WhatsApp is trivially compromised to law enforcement already if you have backups setup which most people have for message recovery and switching phones. The backup is not encrypted with a private key.

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

#229

Post by ComodoHacker »

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).

Aka customized (and backdoored) Android firmware.

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

#230

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

wallaBBB wrote: post #187
RachelF wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes you wonder how many commercial VPN services are just FBI honeypots?

One of the (publicly unspoken) conditions to offer VPN services in western countries is to keep logs and provide on their request, regardless of the marketing stories. There are several verifiable cases where Nord has cooperated with FBI and Interpol and provided logs, but this is a fairly small lie, compared to the time when they tried to keep quiet about a breach. Not saying that having a VPN service from Russia or…

Russia and China would in fact be a better solution as most Westerners are never going to be subject to Russian or Chinese authorities.
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