Inside a Multinational Cyber Weapons Deal That Went Bust

He's a burly guy in a little bit intimidating. He worked mostly society events in Italy, like Georgia Armani's fort anniversary party. This particular job was a little different. His boss needed him to fly to Mauritania in West Africa. He was told to bring a dark suit and accompany someone to a meeting with the government there. His boss made it sound like it was an emergency. My brother, uh, you don't see any danger, is saying, okay, I haven't

two good name just for a presentation. That's Mauricio Provisionado. He's Christians brother. We just do the demo in thought of the Mauritanian development and it seemed like a easy job. It turned out that this wasn't an easy job at all. Christian was arrested by the Mauritanian government, imprisoned and held hostage there and he's still there. What was supposed to be a one week assignment has turned into a sixteen month nightmare, all because he unknowingly walked into a cyber

weapons right as it was going bad. Hi, I'm Akito on Jordan Robertson, and this week on Decrypted, we're taking you deep into the underworld of cyber crime. This is a world of offshore bank accounts and meetings that never happened, a world where governments and organizations a huge sums of money to spy on each other and on their own people. As we spend more of our lives on our digital devices,

the market for these cyber weapons is exploding. But first, let's explain why Christian went to Mauritania in the first place and the deal that he was supposed to be closing. For that, I need to introduce you to Maniche Kumar. Maniche is an up and coming entrepreneur in the cyber arms dealing world. But he came from humble beginning. He watched you to videos to teach himself how to code in a rural village in northern India. Yes, so let's talk about this market for cyber weapons. It sounds scary

and it is. You're selling the ability to take advantage of someone someone's software or phone or hardware that that's that's being targeted. And um, having the ability to is very advantageous to lots of individuals. So um, there's a lot of money involved for sure to be able to purchase in and use these things. That's Andrew Blake, who's a researcher at Lookout, which is a company that specializes

in mobile security. We had him come into our San Francisco studio to walk us through how this market works and some of the more technical details of our story today that we're going to be getting into a little bit later. And when he said that there's a lot of money at stake, he means a lot of money. Researchers estimate that this market is worth billions of dollars. Okay, so back to the niche. He's made a bit of

a name for himself in this world. He wrote a book called The Secret of hacking that got the attention of the Indian government. They asked me Niche to use his hacking skills to crack into China's secret operating system, a computer network they were using to spy on countries like India. But Maniche is really entrepreneurial. He wanted to be more than just the guy who does odd hacking

jobs for the Indian government. He realized that the market for selling offensive technology, as in the technology that a government could use to launch an attack, breaking into a network or spy on another country. Yeah, that market is much bigger. This kind of technology that Meniche was selling. People call it all kinds of things like cyber arms, cyber weapons, exploits attacks. What you need to know is

that these are tools to hack and spy on other people. Now, Maniche wouldn't talk to us on the record for this episode, and I think you will understand why pretty shortly. But I did go to India to meet him for some reason. He let me a reporter check out the spots where he used to meet his clients and learn about how he built his business. Menisia's tall was slicked back here. He's handsome like he could have ended up on a

Bollywood set if he had made different life choices. And his company, Wolf Intelligence, which is based in Munich, looks pretty good too. They have an office in Dubai, another in Romania, a Swiss CEO, and booths at every major military technology conference around the world. Yeah, these are all the trappings of a respectable boutique surveillance company. But when you meet Monichian person, it doesn't take along to realize only part of the image is real and part is

for show. He's still learning about this world of enemy hunting spy technology. Yeah, like how to be in the room when the really big deals go down. So back in December, Maniche lies to Doha, Qatar and sets up a booth at an industry fair called Millipole Qatar held at the Doha Convention Center. I'm reading its website here that says it's the leading international exhibition dedicated to homeland security in the Middle East, and it's held under the

authority of the Prime Minister of Qatar. So it's not like they're meeting in a dark back alleyway, right, it's actually a perfectly legitimate conference. Yeah. Absolutely, Imagine the sixty five thousand square foot convention center with buyers from more than sixty countries checking out armored vehicles, machine guns, and surveillance systems. It's there that Maniche makes the deal of

a lifetime. So he manages to pique the interest of a couple of government officials from the small African state of Mauritania. Miniche gives them a more detailed demo. Within a month, Mauritanias signs a two point five million dollar contract with Maniche. He'll get paid in installments. This is certainly the biggest splash in his short career as a cyber arms dealer now, but it's very nature. The cyber arms market operates under what economists politely call a trust deficit.

That means that because everyone's trying so hard to cover their tracks, it's basically impossible to know who you're dealing with, whether your business partner is a thief, a scammer, or

something more dangerous. If you're going through kind of the backdoor channels and the black markets and things like that, it's a little bit of the wild West, right You're you're selling these things out there, Um, you don't know who you're selling them to, really, so you mean you might be selling them someone that's trying to set you up. You might be selling them someone that wants to use

them moliciously. You might be selling them to someone that just wants to get them and use them for research purposes. As these things go, Mauritaneous was pretty close to the bottom of the shark tank as a population of only four million people, and it's had ten coups since sixty when it gained independence. It's one of the last places on Earth where slavery still exists, and the government is

regularly condemned for human rights abuses. But Maniche is a hired gun and there's a lot of money on the line and deals like these, and he's not particularly bothered by that. The way Moniche views the world is if he doesn't make these deals, someone else will. But right now he's trying to fix a more immediate problem, which is that as part of the whole two point five million dollar package, monichha agreed to deliver the Mauritanians a

piece of technology that he actually doesn't have. What exactly that technology is that's coming up, But first a word from our sponsor. Inside the most successful organizations, i T has gone from supporting the business to driving the business, but the costs of legacy infrastructure can impede this progress. Budgets can't stretch enough to pay for digital ovation at

the speed required. No one gets a blank check. The answer is to change the economics of your I T by shifting from ownership to use, from licenses to subscriptions, from proprietary to open. Change the economics of it with open software from red hat. Learn more at red hat dot com. Okay, so, before the break, Miniche had managed to close a two point five million dollar deal with the Mauritanian government, and included in the deal was a

piece of highly sophisticated surveillance software. And Jordan's until you brought the story to me, I didn't even know that this thing existed. Yeah, I didn't know much about it either. It's called a silent SMS attack. When you want to essentially hack into someone's phone, you need them to execute like a piece of software on their device to take advantage of the vulnerabilities and install the malicious software on the device. Now, how you actually get the user to

exploit their phone is a number of different ways. You know, in the past, there's things like you can install malicious application that will take advantage and break the sandbox and break the security features of the device, but that requires and tricking the user into installing them. Let's just app through efficient campaign or something like that. So what Andrew is describing here, these are those emails that are like, you know, click on this link to win ten million

dollars right now. Exactly, you as the user, need to click on a link that triggers a whole process that allows the hacker to take control of your phone. But there's also another way. In phone carriers like Verizon and a T n T often sent invisible text messages to their customers to get them to update their software. It says if they have a backdoor into your phone, because you, the owner of the phone, don't have to click on or download or open anything, it's just happens automatically. And

because it happens in total stealth, it's called a silent SMS. Now, as you can imagine, this pathway is usually guarded with

tons and tons of security walls. But if a hacker manages to find a security hole that allows them that secret access to anyone's phone, it's the holy grail for hackers because like all of our lives are now on our phones in this case right, all of our information, banking, personal all on one single device for us now that they become these highly valuable targets because everything is in

one spot now for us to access. Even the way in which we log into our systems are two factor tokens and things like that are all all located on our phone device. So having the ability to get in quickly and silently is very advantageous for these kinds of targeted attacks that are out there. Once they have their software on there and they've you know, they've taken advantage of it, they can do whatever they want. They basically have a backdoor inteier device to do to do anything.

So this is really powerful stuff, something only maybe a handful of very sophisticated players can pull off. And this is the technology Meniche needs to get his hands on, so he flies to Israel, the beating heart of cyber warfare.

Through a network of connections, Minich is told that someone called Duty Sternberg, a cyber weapons broker, might have what he's looking for, and Maniche goes to Duty's leather appointed offices in a high rise inside Tel Aviv to get into Duty's office, Miniche has to go through a branch of a local bank with metal detectors set up at the door. Menich is very impressed. Dot he wants a million dollars for this piece of software, and he wants a big part of that cash upfront. Now, this is

a real dilemma for Meniche. In this murky world of cyberweapons, the normal rule of business they don't apply. Yes, someone violates the terms of a contract if they don't pay or if they don't deliver, it's not like you can just go see them right. There's nobody enforcing the law. And the problem here is manichees starting to suspect that the Mauritanian government is probably never going to pay him

the final one million dollars of his contract. And at the same time, Maniche isn't sure if he can trust Duty, the Israeli broker, to deliver a real silent SMS exploit. So there's a very real risk here that Maniche would end up with basically no profit if he pays Duty. But Mauritania doesn't pay him, So Maniche decides to buy time. He doesn't give Duty the down payment, which means he never gets the silent SMS. In the meantime, in Mauritania,

government officials are getting antsie. They've paid one point five million dollars to Miniche, but they haven't received most important part of the software that they were promised. And there was an Indian technician Miniche had sent to Mauritania to help the government use the software that Miniche had delivered to them so far. But as soon as the technician arrived in Mauritania, the government confiscated that technicians passport, took the technician as hostage and Miniche had to find a

way to get the guy out. At this point, Meniche is wondering maybe he can convince them to accept a package without the silent SMS. Maybe they'll take a discount and to set up another meeting with the Mauritanian government, Miniche decides he wants a white European guy with his

staff to do it now. The reason for this is Manich is very concerned about being discriminated against because of his ethnicity, so his plan is to get white Europeans to accompany him and his staff on important meetings to add what he views is additional legitimacy to his company. That's when Christian previous Yonnado, our Italian bodyguard comes in Minisia had worked with Christians boss in the past, so Christians boss called Christian and asked him to fly out

to Mauritania immediately. My brother has not time to check to investigate, because normally when you receive an offer job offer, you know you have to prepare and you have to study everything. But they wish so hard my brother. They say, oh, it is an emergency, you have to fly tomorrow morning, so Pizza don't give the time to my brother to check to what's really is going on the place alone.

So this is really a trap and things got weird right away as soon as Christian arrived and more at NA, a man with no teeth meets him at the airport and takes his passport away. Christian was told this was just standard procedure, something he needs to do to get a visa, but then he doesn't get the passport back. And when Christian arrived at the apartment that Miniche had prepared for him, there's another Italian there called Leo Ratano who's about to leave after staying for a week there,

and he warns Christian that there's something fishy going on. Now, Remember Christian doesn't know any of the background at this point that we've been telling you today that he had walked into the middle of a high stakes deal that's disintegrating by the day. And after he hangs around for a week, Miniche calls off the meeting. He just can't come up with a solution and he simply runs out of time, at which point Christian's boss starts to send

him a frenzied series of WhatsApp messages. He tells Christian to leave the apartment that Miniche's company provided to move to commercially run hotel, to try the German embassy because there's no Italian embassy there. Then, on September one, two weeks after he arrived in Mauritania, Christian disappeared. His boss, his girlfriend, his brother, they all lost contact with him.

You Know, the first twenty four hour, you think, Okay, say come because maybe there is UH some problem with the network, with the communication, you know, the UH Middle Africa, so maybe sometimes it can happen that. But after the second day I start to understand that that, yeah, maybe some problem h was ongoing. On third September, I received a call from the Italian Council in Morocco to tell me that my brother was arrested from the Malitanian government.

That's Maritio Provisionado. Christians brother. Christian was charged with defrauding the Mauritanian state and money laundring. His family was allowed to visit him a couple of times, and his brother was shocked to find out the conditions that Christian was held in for the first few months. I had the possibility to spoke with him. He say, the condition was really bad. Was a room really dirty, the bed was

really bad. And another point is for six months he they did to him just rise and water, rise and water and nothing else. So the problem is my brother is Gabeti and for a toabatic person, uh, the rise it's like a poison. So my brother, in this moment is still alive. But it's a miracle and the fight to get Christian back has turned into this international affair. Top level diplomats from Italy and Mauritania met on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in September and multiple

other meetings after that. Now that the two governments are in talks, Christian's brother says he's held in better conditions, but Mauritaneous simply won't let him go. Well, in Jordan's we are tired. We are really tired, because it's a sixixteen months that we fight every day to found the two to try to to understand what has happened there. We tried to involve all journalist in Ita, but the nine of the media and the journalists in Italy, they

don't want to talk about this study. Mauritania says that the released Christian if they get their one point five million dollars back, and there's been some speculation in Italy that the government might pay the money. As for mi Niche, he's still trying to get Christian back to but he's unwilling to give back the one point five million that

Mauritania has already paid him. And even though Mauritania is demanding that he come back to resolve the disputing person after seeing what happened to Christian, Maniche won't return himself. In October, Minis tried to set up a meeting at a neutral location outside of Mauritania, but the government official never showed and in the meantime, Minie says that he's been busy building his own company. Business has been booming. Mini said he just landed a five hundred thousand dollar

deal with the Egyptian government. And that's it for this week's Decrypted. Thanks for listening. We'd love to know what you thought of this show. You can send a voice message to our producer Pia at p G A D K A r I at Bloomberg dot net, or write to me on Twitter. I'm at Jordan's are one thousand and I'm at aki itso seven. Be sure to subscribe to Decrypted on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts, and please leave us a rating and a review. It

helps more listeners find our show. This episode was produced by Pierre get Kari Magnus, Henrickson and Liz Smith. Jim Ailey edited Jordan's accompanying Business Week story, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com slash business Week and Bloomberg dot com slash Tech. Alec McCabe is head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next week. Don't let your legacy I systems cost you money, innovation and a place at the

digital table of the future. You can change your systems and the economics of it with software from red Hat. See how at red hat dot com.