Police in Australia have hacked into “Ghost,” an encrypted communications platform used by organized criminals, collected users’ messages, and arrested its alleged administrator, according to announcements from various law enforcement agencies. Based on those messages, agencies across Europe, North America, and Australia have conducted raids in the last few days. Countries involved in the wider operation include Canada, France, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States.
The action is just the latest in law enforcement’s continued focus on the encrypted phone industry. The last large operation was Anom, in which the FBI secretly managed its own encrypted phone company to collect tens of millions of messages. Given Ghost’s relatively small size compared to some of the other, previously shut down encrypted phone companies, the operation highlights a broader shift in organized crime. Criminals are moving away from massive brand names like Sky or Encrochat which had tens of thousands of users, to a decentralized collection of smaller players, or to consumer communication apps like Signal. Ghost had several thousand users around the world, and around thousand a messages were sent globally each day, authorities say.