The police spies came up empty. According to L’Express, the DGSI, this French internal intelligence service responsible for the fight against terrorism, failed in its attempt to install spyware on the phone of Mohammed Mogouchkov, the author of the attack on Arras high school.
As the weekly recounts, the decision to monitor the suspect’s phone would have been taken a few days in the days preceding the attack. The national technical service for judicial capture, a structure attached to the DGSI, then attempted to take control of the young man’s phone by sending him a booby-trapped message.
Trapped message
This operating mode is less effective than “zero-click” spyware, spyware capable of very discreetly infecting a phone. Except that this method failed, obviously due to an incompatibility with the suspect’s phone model.
The DGSI therefore tried to lure Mohammed Mogouchkov with a tailor-made booby-trapped message, adapted, as L’Express recalls, to the personality and interests of the target. Without success, however. The weekly also reports the disappointment of a technical intelligence professional for this corrupted link technique, which would have only allowed around a hundred infected phones in 2022.
Phone control
The police then try another approach. On October 12, the day before the attack, the DGSI checked the identity of Mohammed Mogouchkov. The idea is then to find a pretext to gain access to the young Russian’s phone, and thus be able to launch the infection. Here again, the spies leave empty-handed. This failure should lead to the opening of a public debate on the subject of spyware, notes L’Express.
A highly flammable subject, where reason of state and defense of individual freedoms oppose each other, against a backdrop of security drift. As the non-governmental organization Amnesty International recently noted, for example, the Predator spyware, sold in 25 countries to fight organized crime and terrorism, was ultimately also used to spy on journalists and political figures.