A Canadian interdisciplinary laboratory, Citizen Lab, has stated in its latest report that Nigeria’s Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), procured equipment to carry out espionage activities against Nigerians by spying on their calls and text messages.
The report themed, “Running in Circles: Uncovering the Clients of Cyberespionage Firm Circles,” alleges that the country’s foremost military intelligence organization, which reports directly to President Muhammadu Buhari may have been covertly obtaining call information of Nigerians
Citizen Lab discovered that the DIA and body in Nigeria acquired Signaling System 7 (SS7), a protocol suite created for sharing information and routing phone calls between wireline communications companies.
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The DIA procured the system from Circles, a surveillance firm reputed for exploiting the limitations in the global mobile phone system to collect information 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.’”
The equipment is reported to have been active since the inception of Buhari’s government in 2015.
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