Europol Credits Sweeping Arrests to Cracked Sky ECC Comms

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Europol launched “major interventions” against organized crime on March 9, which it said were made possible by monitoring the encrypted messages of around 70,000 users of the Sky ECC service since mid-February.
 
Sky ECC, which focuses on selling mobile phones with specialized, private communications, denies that the messages on its platform were decrypted. However, sweeping arrests across Belgium, France and the Netherlands reported by Europol, in coordination with those countries’ law-enforcement authorities, seem to indicate otherwise. And Europol said it’s not done with the collected data, which it hopes will lead to additional actions and prosecutions.
 
Europol said Sky ECC has about 170,000 users who send around 3 million messages every day, adding that 20 percent of those users are in Belgium and the Netherlands.
 
“By successfully unlocking the encryption of Sky ECC, the information acquired will provide insights into criminal activities in various E.U. Member States and beyond, and will assist in expanding investigations and solving serious and cross-border organized crime for the coming months, possibly years,” Europol said in its announcement.
 
This latest operation follows the EncroChat bust from last July, when the U.K.’s National Crime Agency seized the service’s servers and broke up organized-crime activities being conducted across encrypted messages — including money laundering, where to hide drugs and even murder. More than 700 arrests were made in that bust, and the remaining customers moved over to Sky ECC, Europol said.

This month’s crackdown began in Belgium, Europol explained, when police seized devices from suspects who were found to be using Sky ECC to organize and communicate.
In Belgium alone, the operations involved more than 1,600 Belgian police officers, some escorted by special forces, and raids on 200 individual residences.
 
Dutch police reported that they conducted 75 home raids, arrested 30 suspects and seized millions in cash, eight cars, weapons, cash machines and police uniforms.
A statement from Dutch law enforcement from March 9 said the operation it called “Argus” included the seizure of Sky ECC servers.

Read more: Europol Credits Sweeping Arrests to Cracked Sky ECC Comms | Threatpost