Red Bull was determined to expose everything he could about his captors: their scamming systems, scripts, guides, org chart, photos, even videos he secretly recorded. This clip inside the office shows colored flags on teams of workers' desks, connoting whether they met their scam quotas that month.
Crypto romance scams are the most lucrative form of cybercrime in the world today, stealing tens of billions of dollars a year from victims. But the scammers, workers enslaved in Chinese-mafia-run compounds, are victims too.
My new source was one of them. He asked me to call him Red Bull.
It's tempting to think of Phreeli as a phone carrier where every phone is a burner phone. But Merrill resists that description. Instead, he argues that anonymous cell service should be as normal as curtains on your home's windows.
Phreeli's founder is Nicholas Merrill, who became famous in the privacy world for refusing to comply with a warrantless FBI surveillance order sent to his internet service provider in 2004, demanding a customer's information. He spent a decade-plus in court fighting the order—and won.
That means a dish in a different place would pick up entirely different data. Probably an entirely different stream of unencrypted secrets.
As @mattblaze told me:
A lot of this data, such as the T-Mobile leak, is now encrypted thanks to the researchers' work. But all of it was obtained from a single dish on the roof of a building in San Diego. These findings are based on just 15% of geostationary satellite signals over the US and Mexico.
Most striking to me was that the data included phone calls and text messages from several US and Mexican phone carriers. Remote cell towers connect to core carrier networks via satellite, relaying conversations via space—sometimes with no encryption.
Their study, out today, reveals that roughly half of geostationary satellite communications they monitored were unencrypted. A flood of secrets pouring down from space, available to anyone with an $800 receiver setup. (And there's no doubt spy agencies have been listening, too.)
A source shares some screenshots of the Lapsus ransomware gang celebrating the government shutdown as a disruption to the FBI investigations tracking them.
They also refer to Trump as "my king."
In 3 days, a slick new UK edition of Sandworm comes out with a new cover and new foreword that aims to capture in a few pages the events of the 5+ years since the book first published: www.amazon.co.uk/Operation-Sa...
The publisher has tweaked the title to "Operation Sandworm" for UK reasons I don't entirely understand, but it's the same book, and hopefully will now reach a new audience.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Operation-Sandworm-Hunt-Kremlins-Invisible/dp/1800963130
