Used all over the world, it has just been dismantled and its alleged designer, a 32-year-old Australian, arrested in his country.
While WhatsApp is the best known and most popular, the market for encrypted messaging apps is booming. By encrypting messages, they prevent outsiders from reading private conversations, but are not illegal. However, several features of Ghost have made it particularly attractive to criminals, according to Europol.
Created nine years ago, Ghost only worked on specially modified smartphones (rather than by downloading an app), through a network of resellers based in several countries. Users could get Ghost without giving out personal information or an existing phone number, making the service completely anonymous, Europol said. The service used three encryption standards and users could “self-destruct” remotely all messages and reset the phone if it were, for example, seized by authorities. Europol said Ghost used servers “hidden” in Iceland and France, that its founder was in Australia, while the financial assets were located in the United States.
Who uses Ghost?
According to police, Ghost was used almost exclusively by criminals. “Over several months, and even over hundreds of thousands of intercepted communication patterns, we have no evidence to suggest that the app was being used by anyone other than criminal enterprises.”said Assistant Commissioner David McLean of the Australian Federal Police. Europol said the app had several thousand users worldwide and about 1,000 messages were being exchanged per day. Jean-Philippe Lecouffe, Europol’s deputy executive director, said the operation had dismantled “a tool that was a lifeline for serious crime and organised crime”promoting “drug trafficking, arms trafficking, ultra-violence and money laundering on an industrial scale”Fifty-one suspects were arrested as part of the operation, including 38 in Australia and 11 in Ireland.
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Why was Ghost removed?
WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram are among a wide range of applications that focus on the privacy of conversations. Although their services are legal, some of their content is not. The founder of Telegram was recently indicted in France, with the courts accusing him in particular of not having fought enough against illegal content on his platform.
The big difference is that the vast majority of users of these apps are likely not criminals, while Ghost’s goal appears to have been to enable private chats between criminals. However, during his press conference, Lecouffe sent a message to all encrypted services, saying that access to messages between criminals was the “nerve of war” for investigators.
He said the police were committed to “building a system that respects privacy while upholding justice”. But private companies have “the responsibility to ensure that their platforms do not become playgrounds for criminals”.
Have such dismantlings ever happened?
Several other major apps have been taken down in similar operations in recent years. EncroChat, a global encrypted communications network taken down in 2020, was a service known to be used almost exclusively by criminals and, like Ghost, came bundled with special phones.
When it was taken down, police said the criminals switched to Sky ECC, which was later dismantled. In 2021, another service, ANOM, was taken offline and hundreds of people were arrested. But the catch was that ANOM had been set up and run by the FBI from the start.
Police, however, believed that Ghost was not as large or as widely used as those other services and that the landscape of encrypted apps had become “fragmented”. “For us, size is not the main element”said Mr. Lecouffe. “Sometimes the small networks get the most important criminals and the most interesting information”.
