Security News
With Windows 11, Microsoft is integrating the Microsoft Teams chatting feature into the Windows Taskbar. Microsoft Teams Chat feature is based on Microsoft Teams desktop client and Microsoft is basically extending Teams capability by bringing the dedicated button right to your taskbar.
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.
In a huge sting operation, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and Australian Federal Police ran an "Encrypted chat" service called ANoM for almost 3 years to intercept 27 million messages between criminal gang members globally. "For almost three years, the AFP and the FBI have monitored criminals' encrypted communications over a Dedicated Encrypted Communications Platform," AFP said.
The FBI has revealed how it managed to hoodwink the criminal underworld with its secretly backdoored AN0M encrypted chat app, leading to hundreds of arrests, the seizure of 32 tons of drugs, 250 firearms, 55 luxury cars, more than $148M, and even cocaine-filled pineapples. "The CHS offered this next generation device, named 'AN0M,' to the FBI to use in ongoing and new investigations. The CHS also agreed to offer to distribute AN0M devices to some of the CHS's existing network of distributors of encrypted communications devices."
As FBI Special Agent Nicholas I. Cheviron wrote in the affidavit in support of a search warrant, while the FBI might have dented the supply of encrypted messaging devices, the demand didn't go away. "The continued for these encrypted device platforms by criminals is significant," he wrote.
In the "Largest and most sophisticated law enforcement operations to date," a joint international law enforcement created a fake end-to-end encrypted chat platform designed solely to catch criminals. The FBI and the Australian Federal Police started cooperating three years ago in Operation Ironside, creating a fake encrypted messaging platform called Anom that was sold exclusively to criminals, allowing law enforcement to listen in on their messages and conversations.
The Australian Federal Police has revealed it was able to decrypt messages sent on a supposedly secure messaging app that was seeded into the criminal underworld and promoted as providing snoop-proof comms. Europol and the FBI will detail their use of the app in the coming hours.
A worldwide Microsoft Teams outage is blocking users from logging into their accounts, and preventing those already logged in from sending and receiving messages. The Microsoft 365 Service health status page is currently directing customers to the Microsoft 365 Status Twitter account for more details regarding this widespread incident.
The Belgian plod says it seized 27.64 tons of cocaine worth €1.4bn from shipments into Antwerp in the past six weeks after defeating the encryption in the Sky ECC chat app to read drug smugglers' messages. "During a judicial investigation into a potential service criminal organization suspected of knowingly providing encrypted telephones to the criminal environment, police specialists managed to crack the encrypted messages from Sky ECC," the Belgian police claimed, CNN reports.
The U.S. Department of Justice on Friday announced an indictment against Jean-Francois Eap, the CEO of encrypted messaging company Sky Global, and an associate for wilfully participating in a criminal enterprise to help international drug traffickers avoid law enforcement. Sky ECC is said to have surged in popularity following a similar takedown of Encrochat last July by French and Dutch investigators, with many criminal gangs shifting to the service to carry out criminal acts.