The Sinaloa drug cartel in Mexico hacked the telephone 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 lately printed report by the Justice Division.
The report, which cited an “particular person linked to the cartel,” mentioned a hacker employed by its high brass “provided a menu of providers associated to exploiting cellphones and different digital gadgets.” The employed hacker noticed “’folks 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 information, related to the [attache’s] telephone.”
“Based on the FBI, the hacker additionally used Mexico Metropolis’s digital camera system to comply with the [attache] by means of the town and establish folks the [attache] met with,” the closely redacted report acknowledged. “Based on 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 mentioned the 2018 incident was considered one of many examples of “ubiquitous technical surveillance” threats the FBI has confronted in current many years. UTS, because the time period is abbreviated, is outlined because the “widespread assortment of information and software of analytic methodologies for the aim of connecting folks to issues, occasions, or areas.” The report recognized 5 UTS vectors, together with visible and bodily, digital indicators, monetary, journey, and on-line.
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Justice Division
Whereas the UTS risk has been longstanding, the report authors mentioned, current advances in commercially accessible hacking and surveillance instruments are making such surveillance simpler for much less refined nations and prison enterprises. Sources throughout the FBI and CIA have known as the risk “existential,” the report authors mentioned
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 mobile phone for telephone numbers that is perhaps linked to regulation enforcement.
