US: Hacker enlisted to help Mexican cartel track, kill FBI informants

CBS News reports that the U.S. Department of Justice has disclosed that the infamous transnational drug cartel Sinaloa had been able to monitor and kill FBI informants after hiring a hacker in 2018.

After identifying an FBI assistant legal attache and other persons of interest during espionage activities at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, the unnamed hacker leveraged the attache's phone number to spy on calls and identify their location, as well as hijacked the city's surveillance cameras to determine the individuals met by the attache, according to an audit from the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General. The audit noted such information to have been leveraged by the Sinaloa cartel to threaten or kill witnesses and sources. "Advances in data mining and analysis, facial recognition, and computer network exploitation have made it easier than ever for nation-state adversaries, terrorist organizations, and criminal networks to identify FBI personnel and operations," said the audit, which called on the FBI to examine its vulnerabilities in an enterprise-wide threat evaluation.