US: Alaska man busted with 10,000+ child sex abuse images despite his many encrypted apps
arstechnica.com
Encryption alone won't save you from the feds.

All the recent dark net arrests seem to be pretty vague on how the big bad was caught (except the IM admin’s silly opsec errors) In the article they say he clicked on a honeypot link, but how was his ip or any other identifier identified, why didnt tor protect him.

Obviously this guy in question was a pedophile and an active danger, but recently in my country a state passed a law that can get you arrested if you post anything the government doesnt like, so these tools are important and need to be bulletproof.

  • The Doctor@beehaw.orgEnglish
    51·
    3 months ago

    Let’s see here…

    Potato Chat - This is the first I’ve heard of it so I can’t speak to it one way or another. A cursory glance suggests that it’s had no security reviews.

    Enigma - Same. The privacy policy talks about cloud storage, so there’s that. The following is also in their privacy policy:

    A super group can hold up to 100,000 people, and it is not technically suitable for end-to-end encryption. You will get this prompt when you set up a group chat. Our global communication with the server is based on TLS encryption, which prevents your chat data from being eavesdropped or tampered with by others… The server will index the chat data of the super large group so that you can use the complete message search function when the local message is incomplete, and it is only valid for chat participants… we will record the ID, mobile phone number, IP location information, login time and other information of the users we have processed.

    So, plaintext abounds. Definite OPSEC problem.

    nandbox - No idea, but the service offers a webapp client as a first class citizen to users. This makes me wonder about their security profile.

    Telegram - Lol. And I really wish they hadn’t mentioned that hidden API…

    Tor - No reason to re-litigate this argument that happens once a year, every year ever since the very beginning. Suffice it to say that it has a threat model that defines what it can and cannot defend against, and attacks that deanonymize users are well known, documented, and uses by law enforcement.

    mega.nz - I don’t use it, I haven’t looked into it, so I’m not going to run my mouth (fingers? keyboard?) about it.

    Web-based generative AI tools/chatbots - Depending on which ones, there might be checks and traps for stuff like this that could have twigged him.

    This bit is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the article: “…created his own public Telegram group to store his CSAM.”

    Stop and think about that for a second.