The US government has long underestimated the communications-electronics capabilities of the cartels. To their credit, they used millions of dollars to buy top of the line systems, including advanced encryption, electronic intelligence gathering against the DEA and Coast Guard, and everything else they needed, including jamming, Internet “black-hat hackers”, and lots of informers.
They even went so far as to include deep cover mole agents, who would only function if major stakes were involved, so are very hard to detect.
News
How Mexican drug cartels target social networkers
Last updated Dec 11, 2015,
Dave Copeland
One of the main questions following this month’s brutal murders of people who were accused of posting information about Mexico’s hyperviolent drug cartels has been how were the cartels able to determine the identities of people who thought they were making anonymous posts.
A barely-noticed article from this summer may shed light on the cartels’ methods: in addition to recruiting armed mercenaries, corrupt politicians and crooked cops, cartels like Los Zetas appear to also be actively recruiting hackers, sometimes forcibly.
While hackers have primarily been recruited to carry out more traditional crimes, such as credit card cloning and cyber money laundering, it is possible they may have also been brought into the cartels to help identify people who share information about drug running activity on social networks.
Posts on Mexican crime blogs and on social networks like Twitter have become vital in tracking cartel movements as journalists — fearing they will be executed — have shied away from covering the cartels.
Blog del Narco, one of the leading voices in cartel coverage, claims it was started because because “the media and government in Mexico try to pretend that nothing is happening, because the media is intimidated and the government has apparently been bought.†Other residents of the areas hit hardest by the violence turn to Twitter, following updates on hash tags like #mexicorojo.
“La información es poder, un concentrador de noticias y datos,†Phil Dumphy tweeted to the thread on Wednesday. (Loosely translated: information is power, a source of news and facts.)
Posts on the #mexicorojo hash tag range from retweeting of mainstream news articles to expressions of outrage to hyper-specific details about gang activities and movement throughout Mexico. The posts can also be grim:
“At least 50 executed at the end of the week,†Luis Cárdenas López posted on Monday, updating the ever-mounting death toll. More than 40,000 people have been killed or gone missing in the past decade..
http://www.dailydot.com/news/mexican-drug-cartels-hackers-target-networkers/