Police raids across Europe after encrypted phone network shut down

Peter Fairbrother peter at tsto.co.uk
Thu Mar 11 13:00:36 PST 2021


On 11/03/2021 00:16, jim bell wrote:
> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/mar/10/police-raids-across-europe-after-encrypted-phone-network-shut-down
> 

A bit old news, but -

I don't know the details, but it seems there was (yet another) encrypted 
network for criminals with a central server. Ouch, has no-one heard of 
traffic analysis?

Which server, if hacked, would give access to the comms it was supposed 
to protect. Double ouch bad, the server should never have been able to 
see plaintext traffic.

And of course such a server is a big fat target for law enforcement 
hackers...

LE say it was hacked, the server maintainers say not. It doesn't really 
matter (except to the arrested I suppose) - the system design made it a 
major clusterfuck waiting to happen.


One wonders when the supposed hack occurred - did LE wait to gather more 
intel? Did they do some judicious fishing?

Or did LE set up the service in the first place?


Peter Fairbrother


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