Operation ANOM, or how the FBI intercepted messages between criminal gangs by providing them with fake phones. New revelations tell us how the FBI pulled off this feat.
This is a veritable “Trojan horse” action on a large scale: Operation ANOM has made it possible to intercept criminals in more than 16 countries.
ANOM, what is it?
Last year, the FBI revealed Operation ANOM Trojan Shield (French: Bouclier de Troie), active from 2018 to 2021. It was the result of a collaboration between law enforcement agencies from several countries and aimed to infiltrate the private communications of criminals through an application, ANOM. It was advertised as a protection service that secured communications and was marketed to organized criminal groups.
In fact, the application not only secures the messages, it also redirects them to the FBI, which intercepts them. Thus, more than 800 criminals and suspects were arrested, including members of the Italian mafia in Australia, the Albanian mafia and drug dealers.
Code copied from an open source app
Vice analyzed the code of the ANOM application in order to explain to us how the FBI built this digital Trojan horse. Apparently, a bot is hidden in the application, in the contact list. Made invisible by the application, the bot was undetectable by the user, but it was there.
It thus operates in the background and receives the messages sent by the user without him noticing. Everything was indeed end-to-end encrypted, but one of the recipients of private communications was the FBI.
All messages copied to the bot contained the location of the sender. Worse, the code used by the FBI was largely copied from the open source code of messaging apps freely available online. The FBI therefore did not even have to create or be inspired by codes, they just had to retrieve an ordinary code found on the Internet. The code itself isn’t particularly well put together, with a number of bugs. However, the ANOM operation was quite successful, despite the amateurish approach of law enforcement.
Source : Vice
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