The Defence intelligence (DIA) acquired equipment to spy on calls and text messages by Nigerians, consistent with a replacement report by CitizensLab.
The Citizen Lab is an interdisciplinary laboratory based at the Munk School of worldwide 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 , which reports on to President Muhammadu Buhari, may are 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 possess bought the system from Circles, a surveillance firm that reportedly exploits weaknesses within the global mobile system to pay attention to calls, texts, and therefore the location of phones.
“Our scanning identified two Circles systems in Nigeria. One system could also be operated by an equivalent entity together 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 (DIA), as its firewall IPs are in AS37258, a block of IP addresses registered to ‘HQ Defence intelligence 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 quarter-hour drive from the secretariat.
The spy equipment has been active under the leadership of President Buhari because 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 also because the first phase of the Nigeria Police Crime and Incident Database Centre, and surveillance vehicles to take care of order within the country.
Members of civil society in Nigeria have faced a good range of digital threats within the past.
A recent report by battlefront Defenders, a person’s rights group, concluded that Nigeria’s government “has conducted mass surveillance of citizens’ telecommunications.”
The Committee to guard Journalists (CPJ) has also reported multiple cases of the Nigerian government abusing phone surveillance.
All calls by TheCable to the Defence intelligence (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 an equivalent surveillance firm employed by DIA.
The Circles system was reported to possess been wont to spy on political opponents in past elections within the country.
The CitizensLab report didn’t state instances where the Circles’ SS7 were wont to spy on citizens and politicians, but this was the utilization case in another countries employing an equivalent systems.
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