In 2018, a hacker hired by the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel run by the famous King Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, Guzmán pulled out the US Embassy in the city of Mexico with the aim of finding “people interested in” USA.
On Friday, the Ministry of Justice of the Inspector General revealed the incident in a published By checking FBI’s efforts to tackle surveillance with the aim of protecting “employees, investigations and businesses”.
The report said the 2018 incident occurred while the FBI was working for research that would eventually lead to the arrest of El Chapo. At that time, according to the report, someone associated with his cartel broke the FBI that the criminal organization had hired a hacker.
The hacker “offered a menu of services related to the exploitation of mobile phones and other electronic devices”, and were able to observe people entering and leaving the US Embassy in the Mexican capital, according to the report, including a FBI Victant Legal Attactic Assistant, of the law.
In a way – the report does not detail how – the hacker was “able to use” the employee’s mobile phone number to “receive calls and be obtained, as well as geographical data related to the employee’s phone.
According to the FBI, the hacker also has access to the Mexican camera system to follow the attachment through the city and to “identify the people” with whom the attachment met, the report was read.
“According to the case agent, the cartel used this information to intimidate and, in some cases, to kill possible sources or to cooperate with witnesses,” the report added.
When reached for comments, the FBI reported questions to the Justice Ministry, which did not respond to a request for comments.
For years, Mexico has been in the bleeding of surveillance and piracy potential, on both sides of the drug war.
On the part of the law, for more than a decade now, they have spent many local and federal law enforcement services in Mexico million dollars To use the spyware made by Piracy group and later NSO group to go after a cartel, as well as stalls and journalists.
From the criminal side, Sinaloa cartel used encrypted phoneswhich are specially created devices designed to minimize the risk of surveillance by stripping the basic functions and the addition of encrypted communications technologies.
According to one ResearchThe Mexican cartels used the security software used by local government organizations “to identify and disappear opponents and hide their crimes.”
Earlier in 2015, Reported the motherboard That local cartels used a “hacker brigade” to build and manage their own communications networks. Later in 2017, The motherboard has revealed That a hacker working for the Sinaloa cartel helped the authorities detect and capture the lieutenant of the indefinite cartel, Dámaso López Núñez. The hacker was originally hired by the cartel in 2014 to try to chart Altiplano’s federal penitentiary, where El Chapo was held at the moment.
