341–350 of 361 posts
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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).
It's pretty interesting! Can't wait for more details on the scheme.
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....
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Sweden just announced 155 arrests: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/europol-berattar-om-det-o...
Which amounts to almost 20% of those arrested. Maybe it's partly due to Sweden historically having strong computer literacy. Only time will tell.
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It was acquired by Kape Technologies, which used to go by the name of Crossrider and has a sketchy history https://hiddenrouter.com/private-internet-access-vpn-to-be-a...
Thoughts on ProtonVPN?
For privacy, the gold (and imperfect) standard is still Tor, and even then you are at the mercy of the owners of the exit node. Freenet and I2P are also interesting.
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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?
"Organised crime" is a bit of a oxymoron. These people are organised in that they make deals with each other in friend networks. But the people involved are not the sharpest knives in the draw. They get their positions via violence and intimidation more than cunning and planning. There are cleaver crooks, but we do not often hear from them. A lot of them work at Wall Street, which contains the biggest and most profit…
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The app could still send your keys _as_ an e2e message (to the app author). OS enforcement would need to be pretty intrusive to stop this (e.g. a pop-up for every message sent, displaying the actual destination of the message). I bet users would get pretty blind to such pop-ups, and it would be easy to trick them into accepting the leaking of their private keys.
If you trust the OS, it could hypothetically be built into the OS such that the app only gives what needs to be encrypted to the OS and gets back an encrypted payload to send, then the app wouldn't need to access your keys? Of course at that point the OS has to either provide good key management itself, or a good API so that the apps can still make things seamless while still not accessing the keys directly.. and pro…
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/certifica...
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It seems like kind of an evil move for law enforcement to put a target on his back like that. But I assume all of the bad guys knew which guy was pushing the phones, so he was probably going to be a target no matter what.
>> It seems like kind of an evil move for law enforcement to put a target on his back like that. This is actually a very old method of getting criminals to cooperate with law enforcement. The FBI used to do this with mob guys all the time in the 1980's. Show up, arrest them publicly, put out false newspaper articles saying he was close to flipping. He starts getting heat from the outfit and sooner or later, distrust…
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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.
It was much more than drug dealers. Generally drug dealers are servants of their community, providing goods and services to people in a collegial manner. These were viscous, murderous, gangsters. Their greed and hubris bought them down as much as cleaver policing. Which is not to minimise the cleverness of the coppers, very cleaver, very smart. Get these parasites out of our communities.
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Sure until you visit a geopolitically aligned airport and get detained and propositioned by a foreign intelligence agency. Then you end up spying against your own country because your VPN provider was just a honeypot for a foreign intelligence agency. Blackmail, forced detention, "crimes against the Chinese state", jail without due process or civil rights, who knows. Maybe you didn't even break US law but Chinese or…
That stuff already happens to people in the West, and people who visit non-Western but Western aligned countries. The fact of the matter is that if you are a Westerner, you are going to spend more time in the Western sphere of influence, of which Russia and China are not a part of.