The Defence Intelligence Agency
(DIA) acquired equipment to spy on calls and text messages by Nigerians,
according to a new report by CitizensLab.
The Citizen Lab is an
interdisciplinary laboratory based at the Munk School of Global Affairs and
Public Policy at the University of Toronto in Canada. The lab focuses on
investigating digital espionage against civil society.
According to its latest report
“Running in Circles: Uncovering the Clients of Cyberespionage Firm Circles,”
Nigeria’s foremost military intelligence agency, which reports directly to
President Muhammadu Buhari, may have been spying on your calls.
The lab found that DIA and another body in Nigeria had acquired Signaling System 7 (SS7), a protocol suite developed for exchanging information and routing phone calls between different wireline telecommunications companies.
DIA is reported to have bought
the system from Circles, a surveillance firm that reportedly exploits
weaknesses in the global mobile phone system to snoop on calls, texts, and the
location of phones.
“Our scanning identified two
Circles systems in Nigeria. One system may be operated by the same entity as
one of the Nigerian customers of the FinFisher spyware that we detected in
December 2014,” the report read.
“The other client appears to be
the Nigerian Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), as its firewall IPs are in
AS37258, a block of IP addresses registered to ‘HQ Defence Intelligence Agency
Asokoro, Nigeria, Abuja.'”
DIA’s public address is at the
Federal Secretariat Complex, Phase II, Shehu Shagari Way, Three Arms Zone,
Abuja, but the IP trace shows the agency’s location in Asokoro, about 15
minutes drive from the secretariat.
The spy equipment has been active
under the leadership of President Buhari as the trace showed their activities
from June 2015 — just after the president took office.
In 2019, the president also
inaugurated the National Command and Control Centre as well as the first phase
of the Nigeria Police Crime and Incident Database Centre, and electronic
surveillance vehicles to maintain order in the country.
Members of civil society in
Nigeria have faced a wide range of digital threats in the past.
A recent report by Front Line
Defenders, a human rights group, concluded that Nigeria’s government “has
conducted mass surveillance of citizens’ telecommunications.”
The Committee to Protect
Journalists (CPJ) has also reported multiple cases of the Nigerian government
abusing phone surveillance.
All calls to the
Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) were neither taken nor returned.
An investigation by Premium Times
had previously found that former governors of Bayelsa and Delta states
purchased systems from the same surveillance firm employed by DIA.
The Circles system was reported
to have been used to spy on political opponents in past elections in the
country.
The CitizensLab report did not
state instances where the Circles’ SS7 were used to spy on citizens and politicians,
but this was the use case in some other countries employing the same systems.
Other governments who may have
acquired this equipment are Australia, Belgium, Botswana, Chile, Denmark,
Ecuador, El Salvador, Estonia, Equatorial Guinea, Guatemala, Honduras,
Indonesia, Israel, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Peru, Serbia,
Thailand, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Vietnam, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
Culled: TheCable
Click to signup for FREE news updates, latest information and hottest gists everydayAdvertise on NigerianEye.com to reach thousands of our daily users
No comments
Post a Comment
Kindly drop a comment below.
(Comments are moderated. Clean comments will be approved immediately)
Advert Enquires - Reach out to us at NigerianEye@gmail.com