SHORT READ
The Criminals Who Informed On Themselves
The Police didn’t need an ‘inside man’ — they just had to read the messages.
Police forces worldwide have scored spectacular success in catching and convicting criminals in the last two years. This achievement is thanks to the Police being able to listen to conversations that the criminals thought were private. Indeed, the miscreants imagined the calls and messages to be fully encrypted.
Their mistake in this respect has now cost many of them their liberty.
In Europe and the Middle East, there were 60,000 users of a system called EncroChat, which offered genuinely secure end-to-end encrypted communications — not even the network operator could decipher the traffic on their network. Many users were criminals, mainly in Europe, although with a significant number in the Middle East, focussed on Dubai.
This system was indeed secure until Netherland, French and British Police teams, working together, located the EncroChat server farm in France. The Police somehow managed to inject some additional software into the system, which meant that Police officers could both listen into and record all the traffic on the network.
