Drug cartel hacked FBI official’s cellphone to trace and kill informants, report says

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,” based on a just lately revealed report by the Justice Division.

The report, which cited an “particular person related to the cartel,” mentioned a hacker employed by its high brass “provided a menu of companies associated to exploiting cell phones 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 obtained, in addition to geolocation knowledge, related to the [attache’s] cellphone.”

“In line with the FBI, the hacker additionally used Mexico Metropolis’s digicam system to observe the [attache] by town and determine folks the [attache] met with,” the closely redacted report acknowledged. “In line with the case agent, the cartel used that data to intimidate and, in some cases, kill potential sources or cooperating witnesses.”

The report did not clarify what technical means the hacker used.

Existential menace

The report mentioned the 2018 incident was considered one of many examples of “ubiquitous technical surveillance” threats the FBI has confronted in current a long time. UTS, because the time period is abbreviated, is outlined because the “widespread assortment of information and utility 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 alerts, monetary, journey, and on-line.

Whereas the UTS menace 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 felony enterprises. Sources throughout the FBI and CIA have referred to as the menace “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 substantiate the suspicion, the chief searched name logs of the suspected worker’s cellphone for cellphone numbers that is likely to be related to legislation enforcement.