Dutch police claim to have snooped on more than a quarter of a million encrypted messages sent between alleged miscreants using BlackBox IronPhones.
The extraordinary claim was made in a press conference on Tuesday, in which officers working on a money-laundering investigation reckoned they had been able to see crims chatting “live for some time.”
The suspects had been using the IronChat app on their IronPhones, which uses a custom implementation of the end-to-end off-the-record (OTR) encryption system to scramble messages.
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While the officers did not detail how they got hold of and cracked the encrypted IronChat messages, they had seized BlackBox Security’s server. It sounds as though the encrypted conversations were routed through that system. Therefore, once collared, that box could have been set up to decrypt and re-encrypt messages on the fly, or otherwise intercept the connections, allowing the cops to spy on the chats.
Intelligence from these conversations was then used to snare folks suspected of laundering money and other crimes.
Specifically, the clog-plod seized the website and server of the Edward Snowden-endorsed company BlackBox Security after arresting two men apparently behind the business: a 46-year-old from Lingewaard, and a 52-year-old from Boxtel. Another three men were nabbed in Almelo and Enschede, and police expect to make “hundreds” more arrests in the course of their investigation.
Robin Edgar
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