Drug and human traffickers are shittng bricks right now. Their app might have been compromised. Not really clear if it was.
Police crack world’s largest cryptophone network as criminals swap EncroChat for Sky NCC
>https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252497565/Police-crack-worlds-largest-cryptophone-network-as-criminals-swap-EncroChat-for-Sky-NCC
Belgian and Dutch police have breached the encryption of Sky ECC, the world’s largest cryptophone network, which became the service of choice for criminals after police brought down rival EncroChat last year
When the French gendarmerie, Dutch police and the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) infiltrated the EncroChat encrypted phone network last summer, organised crime groups around the world opted to switch to a new phone supplier.
That supplier was Sky ECC, now the largest supplier of crypto communications worldwide, with 70,000 customers.
Sky ECC bills itself as the “most secure messaging platform you can buy” and is so confident of the impregnability of its systems that it offers a handsome reward for anyone who can break the encryption of one of its phones.
But in a re-run of last year’s French and Dutch operation against the EncroChat encrypted phone network, Belgian and Dutch police were able to infiltrate the platform and harvest hundreds of thousands of supposedly unbreakable messages.
They have shared the intercepted material with a “large number” of overseas investigations services after reading encrypted traffic “live”.
The NCA, which played a key role in disrupting EncroChat working with the Dutch police and the French gendarmerie, has yet to comment on whether it has benefited from intelligence from the Sky operation.
Sky ECC said in a statement last night that allegations that the Belgian and Dutch authorities had cracked the company’s communications software were “false” and that its service had been restored after an outage.
The company said its distributors had alerted it that a fake phishing application, branded Sky Ecc, had been loaded into insecure phones and sold through unauthorised channels.
“Sky ECC did not authorise or cooperate with the investigative authorities or those involved with the distribution of the fake phishing application,” said the company.