Cartel Hacker Used Security Cameras, FBI Official’s Phone to Hunt Informants

The U.S. Justice Department released a 47-page report detailing how a single hacker affiliated with Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel gained access to a vast network of powerful spying tools to identify and hunt down FBI informants.

According to the DOJ’s Inspector General, in 2018, an unnamed cartel-linked hacker gained access to Mexico City’s security grid of over 18,000 cameras and matched it with phone data to identify informants working with the FBI. The hacker was hunting snitches, and he found them.

The hacker’s surveillance campaign included staking out the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City to track who was coming and going. From there, he somehow got his hands on an FBI legal attaché’s phone number (the report doesn’t explain how), then cracked into the device’s call history and location data.

He cross-referenced that with live camera footage and essentially created himself a top-of-the-line facial recognition software suite that could identify potential informants. Several of those people were later intimidated or even killed, according to the report.

The audit paints a disconcerting picture of just how easily this technology can be used and abused by hostile governments, terrorists, and criminal enterprises. It’s an extraordinarily powerful tool that ensures no one is ever really alone or anonymous. Even FBI officials were ID’d, and informants were hunted down with a vast surveillance ecosystem that some guy tapped into like the hacker sidekick in a Fast and Furious movie.

The audit concludes with what reads like the FBI and the entire American surveillance state looking itself in the mirror and telling itself that it needs to get its act together, perhaps by performing an audit, because if one cartel hacker with access to a security camera network and phone data can turn their surveillance tools into a cartel weapon, what could one of the many – much better funded – countries that America considers an “enemy” do if it got its hands on it?