The Sinaloa drug cartel in Mexico hacked the phone of an FBI official investigating kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán as a part of a surveillance campaign “to intimidate and/or kill potential sources or cooperating witnesses,” in response to a recently published report by the Justice Department.
The report, which cited an “individual connected to the cartel,” said a hacker hired by its top brass “offered a menu of services related to exploiting mobile phones and other electronic devices.” The hired hacker observed “’people of interest’ for the cartel, including the FBI Assistant Legal Attache, after which was in a position to use the [attache’s] cell phone number to acquire calls made and received, in addition to geolocation data, related to the [attache’s] phone.”
“Based on the FBI, the hacker also used Mexico City’s camera system to follow the [attache] through the town and discover people the [attache] met with,” the heavily redacted report stated. “Based on the case agent, the cartel used that information to intimidate and, in some instances, kill potential sources or cooperating witnesses.”
The report didn’t explain what technical means the hacker used.
Existential threat
The report said the 2018 incident was certainly one of many examples of “ubiquitous technical surveillance” threats the FBI has faced in recent a long time. UTS, because the term is abbreviated, is defined because the “widespread collection of information and application of analytic methodologies for the aim of connecting people to things, events, or locations.” The report identified five UTS vectors, including visual and physical, electronic signals, financial, travel, and online.
Credit:
Justice Department
While the UTS threat has been longstanding, the report authors said, recent advances in commercially available hacking and surveillance tools are making such surveillance easier for less sophisticated nations and criminal enterprises. Sources throughout the FBI and CIA have called the threat “existential,” the report authors said
A second example of UTS threatening FBI investigations occurred when the leader of an organized crime family suspected an worker of being an informant. In an attempt to verify the suspicion, the leader searched call logs of the suspected worker’s mobile phone for phone numbers that is perhaps connected to law enforcement.