Dutch police seize the Ennetcom encrypted communication network

The Dutch police in an international effort with Canadian authorities seized the Ennetcom encrypted communication network used by 19,000 users.

Another success of the Dutch law enforcement against the cybercrime. The police arrested the owner of Ennetcom, a provider of encrypted communications with more than 19,000 customers. Prosecutors suspect he was using the business to manage illegal activities, including money laundering, and so they decided to shut the network.

“Tuesday, April 19th, 2016 revealed that judicial research is being done towards Ennetcom. There has been an international collaboration of various government agencies and Interpol in attempt to put our network down. Previously there have been attempts to put us down, amongst them the Dutch intelligence service, but they never succeeded (see Wikileaks).

Regarding the current investigation, Ennetcom is forced to suspend all operations and services for the time being. Ennetcom regrets this course of events and insinuations towards Ennetcom. It should be clear that Ennetcom stands for freedom of privacy!

Because of security and privacy reasons Ennetcom chooses to keep all systems offline.” states the message currently displayed on the company website

A Dutch Judge ordered a 14-days detection of Danny Manupassa, to conduct its investigation without interferences.

“Police and prosecutors believe that they have captured the largest encrypted network used by organized crime in the Netherlands,” said the prosecutors in an official statement.

Be careful, the use of encrypted communications is not illegal, anyway, it is often abused by crooks for illegal activities.

As usually happens in similar cases, investigations are complicated due to territorial competences, the majority of Ennetcom customers are in the Netherlands, but the company’s servers were in Canada. Prosecutors said information on the servers in Canada has been copied in cooperation with Toronto police.

Fortunately, Canadian authorities cooperated with the Dutch colleagues allowing the access to the company servers and the information extracted would be used in the investigation against Manupassa.

“The company sold modified telephones for about 1,500 euros each and used its own servers for the encrypted data traffic,” the prosecutors said. “The phones had been modified so that they could not be used to make calls or use the Internet.”

All the customers of the Ennetcom company were sent a notification that informed them of the ongoing investigation.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Ennetcom, cybercrime)