Talk about a honeypot

>Operation Ironside began almost three years ago and is the Australian component of a long-term, international, covert investigation. The FBI and AFP targeted the dedicated encrypted communications platform, which was used exclusively by organised crime. >After working in close partnership on Operation Safe Cracking to take down the encrypted platform provider Phantom Secure, the AFP and FBI worked together to fill the vacuum. >The FBI had access to a new app, named AN0M, and began running it without the knowledge of the criminal underworld. >The AFP provided the highly skilled-technical staff, and capability to decrypt and read encrypted communications in real time, giving law enforcement an edge it had never had before. >AFP Commissioner Reece Kershaw thanked the FBI for its cooperation, along with the 18 countries that worked with the AFP to maintain the integrity of the platform.

>join the honeypot >catfish the feds >soykaf on their faces Muahahahahahahahaha

Why every time there is some "darknet criminal" bust, they end up using some obscure shovelware honeypot nobody ever heard about? Are these lads too hardcore for plain old Jabber over onions? Has this even happened or the FBI just makes things up to boost up their budget?

>>16090 IRL very few people are actual 31337 hackermans with the skills and patience to set up their own servers for communication.

>>16092 I honestly believe that doing a web search for "XMPP servers list", installing Conversations with Tor on your soyphone and encrypting everything with OTR or OMEMO is a more publicly known way to secure communications than this soykafware honeypot with, uuuh, 9000 users?. Do I visit the different kind of "darknet forums"? It's pretty much universal knowledge on any of those, every lowlife druggie knows two things about "open source" requirement at least. Either this, or they simply use FSBgram/CIAgnal/Wiggr with non-personalized phone numbers, One of the aforementioned messaging services is even more preferred since such news would act as universal canary proof of it being glowed, now officially and without redemption. * Or perhaps, the FBI made up this "AN0M" messenger as a way to cover up busts related to one of these popular "privacy" messengers in order to not spook the beefy users still under surveillance?

None of the web archives contain captures of the supposed domains anom.io and anom.com prior to this day. There is a Bing cache capture dated June 6th, two days ago: https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=an0m.io&d=4785495723611724&mkt=en-AU&setlang=en-AU&w=GxrbtGTOeoSAMU0PAkDVDUTyOeXqUYNt From this tweet which does not cite source: https://birdsite.xanny.family/MichaelM_ACT/status/1402086472543465472 Archive Today has snapshots from Google Cache, also dated June 6th: https://archive.today/https://anomexposed.wordpress.com/ Discussions on reddit and hackernews for further cross-reference: https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/nupcn0/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27430508 Seems like a made-up thing to me.

>>16095 Yeah, it's hard to know if it isn't just parallel construction to hide that the common services glow intensely.

>>16095 Don't confuse everything you read with what everyone is doing. The only thing you can rely on is people adopting what they need to do the things they want. For example people need to be on Tor to access DNMs. They should all be using Tails or better but I guarantee that many are using TBB on a Windows laptop because it's easier and it's technically good enough. It works the same way for messaging apps but it's subtly worse because of network effects. In this case, according to news sources, these were customized devices that got a toe hold at high levels of organized crime and the convenience and network effects helped it spread. >>16096 I don't doubt that parallel construction may be involved. ACAB, etc. But the whole thing being made up? There are 800 claimed arrests. I don't know about the laws in all the various countries, but in some of them those arrests are public information and the defendants have access to all the evidence. They should already have whatever evidence was used for the various warrants. If AN0M is made up, how long do you think it will take for one of the defendants to blow the whistle or for the public to find out that some of those arrests are fictitious?

>>16086 The thing that I'm still not sure about is why they publicly announced that they did this. What are they panning here? Or maybe they just realized keeping this a secret would be impossible? I saw people saying that there were hundreds of police cars zooming around their area.

>>16109 It received a pretty widespread international coverage too, so I'm guessing that part of the reason for publicly announcing it was simply the operation's massive scale - was it like 18 countries that worked in cooperation with the U.S. security officials? The other part of the reason most definitely has to do with manipulating/manufacturing public perception like trust in the eyes of normal persons and insecurity and fear for criminals.