Info on dozens of criminal cases found on PGP phones

Further investigation into servers of so-called PGP phones gave the Dutch Public Prosecutor insight into over million new messages. These messages contain information that can be used in dozens of criminal investigations, the Prosecutor said, NU.nl reports.

PGP stands for 'Pretty Good Privacy', a security standard used on phones sold by Ennetcom. The company promised that messages would be encrypted in such a way that they can not be read by, for example, the police. PGP phones were therefore popular among criminals.

The servers in question were confiscated in Canada and Costa Rica in 2016. In 2017 the Dutch authorities revealed that they decrypted and are able to read 3.7 million messages sent with PGP phones that were stored on these servers. The data helped them in various investigations.

Now a million extra messages were found in the backup systems of the servers.