According to a new US government surveillance report in 2018, the hackers hired by Mexico’s Kingpin Joaquin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman with the goal of targeting and killing “people of interest” at the US embassy in Mexico City were spies by Mexico Kingpin Joaquin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
On Friday, the Department of Justice inspector’s office revealed the case in a published report auditing the FBI’s efforts to counter surveillance with the goal of protecting “employees, investigations and operations.”
The report said the 2018 incident occurred while the FBI was working on an investigation that ultimately led to El Chapo’s arrest. At the time, someone connected to his cartel turned the FBI over the crime organisation hired hackers, according to the report.
The hackers “provided a menu of services related to the use of mobile phones and other electronic devices, allowing people to observe people coming and going to the US embassy in the Mexican capital.
Somehow – the report was not detailed how exactly and how hackers were – hackers were associated with civil servant phones because they were getting calls, as well as the official phone numbers and the geographical data associated with the official phone.
According to the FBI, hackers also accessed Mexico City’s camera system, chasing Attache through the city, reading the report, “identifying the people” that Attache met.
“According to the case agent, the cartel used that information to blackmail and in some cases killed potential sources or cooperative witnesses,” the report added.
When contacted for comment, the FBI called the Department of Justice for questions but did not respond to requests for comment.
For years, Mexico has been on both sides of the drug war, at the edge of surveillance and hacking abilities.
On the law side, for more than a decade, several local and federal law enforcement agencies in Mexico have spent millions of dollars on their efforts to chase cartels, activists and journalists using spyware created by hacking teams and subsequent NSO groups.
On the crime side, the Sinaloa Cartel used encrypted mobile phones. This is a specially created device designed to minimize the risk of surveillance by stripping away core functionality and adding encrypted communications technology.
According to a Vice News investigation, Mexican cartels were tapping security software used by local government agencies “to find rivals, vanish and hide crime.”
In early 2015, Motherboard reported that local cartels had adopted a “hacker brigade” to build and manage their own communications networks. In late 2017, Motherboard revealed that a hacker working at the Sinaloa Cartel helped authorities track and arrest li in the elusive cartel. The hacker was originally hired by the cartel in 2014 and was about to hack into the high-security Altiplano federal prison where El Chapo was held at the time.
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