NarcoFiles: Dozens of DEA agents face risk of exposure in Colombian cyber leak
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/colombia/article281471943.html
Excerpt:
A cyber breach at Colombia’s prosecutor’s office has exposed the identities of more than 100 agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and other federal law enforcement entities, along with scores of their Colombian and global counterparts.
The names of at least 90 DEA agents and at least 15 Homeland Security Investigations agents were revealed in the leak, which was shared with journalists and included a huge trove of emails and other data.
Although the DEA itself was not breached and journalists are not publishing the names or any identifying information about the agents, the leak demonstrates a lack of safeguards on the part of Colombia, a strategic U.S. ally in its efforts to counter drug cartels.
“It’s one of [the DEA’s] nightmares because [cartels] … can identify agents and informants, especially if you are still in-country,” said Mike Vigil, a former DEA international operations chief who helped the agency expand its global intelligence footprint worldwide.
“Anytime that unauthorized people have the name of an agent or an informant, it’s not difficult to locate them.”
A cartel might not want to risk the consequences of killing a DEA agent, Vigil said, but “to them, informants are fair game because they are considered traitors and [a cartel] will kill them to send a message to others thinking of cooperating.”
The leak from the Colombian prosecutor’s office provided the basis for the NarcoFiles, a multinational investigative reporting project by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project along with more than 40 other news outlets, including the Miami Herald.
The project — led by OCCRP in partnership with Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodística — began with a leak of emails from the Colombian Prosecutor’s Office, which were shared with media outlets around the world.
Reporters examined and corroborated the materials with hundreds of other documents, databases, and interviews.
In October 2022, the Colombian prosecutor’s office acknowledged in a statement that there had been a breach, but it did not say what was exposed in the hack. The leak poses a potentially greater threat to Colombian law enforcement and other authorities since it includes names of Colombian undercover agents, witnesses and key details about informants.
A “hacktivist” organization calling itself Guacamaya, a common word in parts of Latin America for the macaw parrot, has claimed responsibility.
Guacamaya also said it had hacked the Mexican Defense Ministry, as well as the defense departments of Chile, Colombia, and others — apparently by exploiting a vulnerability in an email server used by companies and governments around the world.
In its manifesto, Guacamaya called the Colombian prosecutor’s office “one of the most corrupt organizations in the country,” and accused it of being servile to U.S. interests.
Once it had hacked the prosecutor’s office, Guacamaya shared the five terabytes of information, including about seven million emails, with two intermediary groups. Those groups then shared the data with journalists.
Spokespersons for the DEA and Justice Department did not respond to multiple emails requesting comment.......
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The DEA another deep state org that accomplishes very little and needs to be eliminated. We already have many orgs. at the federal, state and local level that do what the DEA does.
Eliminating the DEA would hurt the CIA drug trafficking money laundering program financing their off the books programs./s