- Messages obtained from a cracked E2EE service used to take down a criminal gang
- Sky ECC service still provides information, four years after being shut down
- A hotel, property, cash and vehicles were seized in the operation
Europol has conducted several attacks against a productive organized crime network involved in trading in cocaine and money laundering money.
The raids led to the arrest of 10 suspects and the seizure of an entire tourist hotel as well as several other property and over € 100,000 ($ 116,106) in cash.
But the secret of the success of the operation came from analyzing encrypted communication from a chat network that closed over four years ago.
Communication Network Analysis
The encrypted communications network is the Sky ECC network run by Sky Global.
The network was closed by law enforcement in 2021 due to the platform’s use of international criminal organizations to facilitate drug trafficking. Prosecutors and arrests were issued to Sky Global’s CEO Jean-François EAP, and a former distributor Thomas Herdman.
Alongside the seizure of the site, law enforcement also confiscated a trove of hundreds of millions of messages sent between thousands of criminals using the Sky ECC app that protected its messages with 512-bit elliptical-curve chryptography. These are these messages still used by Europol in Operation Sky ECC and Operational Task Force Limit.
Europol has launched several subsequent subsequent criminal organizations throughout Europe by means of metadata analysis from the announcement.
In this particular Europol operation, led by the Albanian spak, used investigators from Albania, Belgium, France and the Netherlands communication data to identify the location of several tonnes of deliveries of cocaine from South America to ports in the EU for which a target for the operation got up to $ 40 million. Delivery gates included larger nodes such as Antwerp and Rotterdam.
Included in the suspects arrested were the leader of the criminal organization, which was also in demand in Italy for murder, deprivation of freedom, tried to hide a corpse, threats, illegal possession of explosives and ammunition, and obstacle to justice.
This operation and the case of Sky ECC highlights the thin line between using encrypted communication to ensure data protection and prevent companies or government overreach and data protection abuse to operate an international criminal ring responsible for drug trafficking and laundering of hundreds of millions of euros.
