The Sinaloa drug cartel in Mexico hacked the cellphone of an FBI official investigating kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán as a part of a surveillance marketing campaign “to intimidate and/or kill potential sources or cooperating witnesses,” in line with a not too long ago printed report by the Justice Division.
The report, which cited an “particular person related to the cartel,” stated a hacker employed by its high brass “supplied a menu of companies associated to exploiting cellphones and different digital units.” The employed hacker noticed “’individuals of curiosity’ for the cartel, together with the FBI Assistant Authorized Attache, after which was ready to make use of the [attache’s] cell phone quantity to acquire calls made and acquired, in addition to geolocation knowledge, related to the [attache’s] cellphone.”
“In response to the FBI, the hacker additionally used Mexico Metropolis’s digital camera system to observe the [attache] by the town and determine individuals the [attache] met with,” the closely redacted report acknowledged. “In response to the case agent, the cartel used that info to intimidate and, in some situations, kill potential sources or cooperating witnesses.”
The report did not clarify what technical means the hacker used.
Existential risk
The report stated the 2018 incident was certainly one of many examples of “ubiquitous technical surveillance” threats the FBI has confronted in latest many years. UTS, because the time period is abbreviated, is outlined because the “widespread assortment of knowledge and utility of analytic methodologies for the aim of connecting individuals to issues, occasions, or places.” The report recognized 5 UTS vectors, together with visible and bodily, digital alerts, monetary, journey, and on-line.
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Justice Division
Whereas the UTS risk has been longstanding, the report authors stated, latest advances in commercially obtainable hacking and surveillance instruments are making such surveillance simpler for much less subtle nations and prison enterprises. Sources throughout the FBI and CIA have referred to as the risk “existential,” the report authors stated
A second instance of UTS threatening FBI investigations occurred when the chief of an organized crime household suspected an worker of being an informant. In an try to verify the suspicion, the chief searched name logs of the suspected worker’s cellular phone for cellphone numbers that may be related to legislation enforcement.
