Sinaloa cartel hacked security cameras to track and kill FBI informants, US says
Source: Reuters
Sinaloa cartel hacked security cameras to track and kill FBI informants, US says
Reuters in Washington
Fri 27 Jun 2025 23.35 BST
A hacker working for the Sinaloa drug cartel was able to obtain an FBI official’s phone records and use Mexico City’s surveillance cameras to help track and kill the agency’s informants in 2018, according to a new US justice department report.
The incident was disclosed in a justice department inspector general’s audit of the FBI’s efforts to mitigate the effects of “ubiquitous technical surveillance”, a term used to describe the global proliferation of cameras and the thriving trade in vast stores of communications, travel, and location data.
The report said that the hacker worked for the Sinaloa drug cartel, run by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who was extradited to the United States in 2017.
The report said the hacker identified an FBI assistant legal attaché at the US embassy in Mexico City and was able to use the attaché’s phone number “to obtain calls made and received, as well as geolocation data”. The report said the hacker also “used Mexico City’s camera system to follow the [FBI official] through the city and identify people the [official] met with”.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/27/sinaloa-cartel-fbi-hackers