I’m a little surprised they would choose to advertise the fact that they’ve been able to gain access to this traffic.
Surely disclosing that will just have driven the same users to other apps and they’ll have to start from scratch (and presumably get lucky again in the future)?
They have to disclose the source of information to be able to use it in criminal cases.
>Surely disclosing that will just have driven the same users to other apps and they’ll have to start from scratch
From the sounds of it this app had already been cracked when the Eurochat bust was announced, allowing them to scoop up all the users who tried to just move to the next alternative. I imagine trust in the "secure communications for criminals" ecosystem will be low for a while.
Police did a similar thing with darknet markets, they secretly took control of the second largest (Hansa) and then publicly announced the bust of the largest (Alphabay). They ran it for a month, collecting all the information (and money) they could (even pulling tricks like deleting all the images so drug vendors might accidentally reupload ones with EXIF data) before shutting it down. All the better to erode trust in the entire ecosystem.
Surely disclosing that will just have driven the same users to other apps and they’ll have to start from scratch (and presumably get lucky again in the future)?