Here’s something to remember come the next Sysadmin Appreciation Day: Mexican drug lord El Chapo was only caught because his systems
administrator flipped and started working for the feds, backdooring El
Chapo’s comms infrastructure and providing the cops with the decryption
keys needed to eavesdrop on El Chapo’s operations.
Former narcomorlock Jorge Cifuentes never really seemed to have his heart in the job: at one point, he failed to renew a license
for some critical piece of secure communications software (I’m betting
it’s some kind of SIPP/VoIP server), forcing the narcos to use
cleartext, unsecured voice channels (we know this because the feds made
recordings of El Chapo screaming furious, terrifying abuse at Cifuentes
over one of those insecure channels).
But it wasn’t absentmindedness that brought down El Chapo, it was
collusion, which started after the FBI tricked Cifuentes into meeting
with them in 2010, flipped him and gained access to about 1500 phone
calls.
These recordings are now being played in court, and they’re pretty chilling and extremely damning.
