Security News > 2021 > June > The AN0M fake secure chat app may have been too clever for its own good

Which brings me to last week's news that Australian and US law enforcement agencies seeded a backdoored encrypted chat app named AN0M into the criminal underworld, then intercepted word of a great many crimes and swooped to arrest those responsible.

Late last week, FBI International Operations Division legal attaché for Australia Anthony Russo added another important piece of information: speaking to Australian newspapers he said one reason for discontinuing use of AN0M was that it produced too much intelligence.

Kershaw tried to send a signal that while AN0M has been de-activated, authorities will always seek similar capabilities and have the smarts to do so.

Which sounded like a clear message that criminals should not assume AN0M is the end of a story.

So while the most easily-learned and obvious lesson from AN0M was that criminals ought not to trust anyone selling "Secure" comms apps, another lesson was that even if an app is cracked it's possible to mess up the cops by changing the signal-to-noise ratio.

We may never know if any of what we were told about AN0M this week was one of those useful diversions.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2021/06/14/an0m_and_yamamoto/