Australian Federal Police and FBI nab underworld figures using encrypted app

Re:Australian Federal Police and FBI nab underworld figures ... by walrus01 on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @04:23AM (#27431878)

If I was a US intelligence agency I would specifically establish colocation presences with ISPs in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, china, etc, on commercial ISP terms, and admin the servers remotely to set them up as a commercial vpn service. There's plenty of datacenter operators in Russia that will take your money.

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Re:Australian Federal Police and FBI nab underworld figures ... by stef25 on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @06:01AM (#27432468)

> There's plenty of datacenter operators in Russia that will take your money.

Wouldn't they have some uncomfortable questions to answer when Putin finds out they've been cooperating with the Feds?

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Re:Australian Federal Police and FBI nab underworld figures ... by kryptiskt on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @06:27AM (#27432915)

Presumably the feds wouldn't say who they were and would pose as common criminals, because they wouldn't have any reason to suppose that the datacenter operator would keep quiet if they were open about their identity.

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Re:Australian Federal Police and FBI nab underworld figures ... by 542354234235 on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @07:45AM (#27433832)

But yours assumes that Russia doesn't do counter-intel and wouldn't be looking for exactly these kinds of infiltrations. If it is obvious to us that these things would be targets, I'm pretty sure it is obvious to Russian intelligence services.

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Re:Australian Federal Police and FBI nab underworld figures ... by md_ on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @01:09PM (#27437891)

Bellingcat appear to routinely buy data from Russian blackmarket data brokers.

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Re:Australian Federal Police and FBI nab underworld figures ... by snypher on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @12:09PM (#27449559)

Replace 'buy' with 'receive' and 'Russian blackmarket data brokers' with 'intelligence assets' and you're correct.

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Re:Australian Federal Police and FBI nab underworld figures ... by emc3 on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @09:05AM (#27434607)

Shady fly by night data hosting doing counter-intel, or better, Putin spending his precious rubles on running counter-intel ops for shady fly by night hosting companies, are both hilarious.

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Re:Australian Federal Police and FBI nab underworld figures ... by pueblito on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @10:25AM (#27435600)

Russian govt has always held counter intel to be a top priority and they devote an enormous amount of resources towards it, so why is that hilarious?

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Re:Australian Federal Police and FBI nab underworld figures ... by walrus01 on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @07:18AM (#27433599)

The feds would pose as a slightly shady hosting/Colo company or similar.

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