Politech mailing list archives
FC: Are terrorists using crypto and stego? Or is it just media hype?
From: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>
Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 10:46:00 -0400
[In response to some questions I received: I've said in the past that we should assume for purposes of political debate that terrorists will use crypto and stego, because if they're not now, they eventually will. The Sep. 11 attackers were cunning, if nothing else. But there is a huge difference between expecting that terrorists will eventually go in this direction -- and accepting as fact vague and self-promoting reports that the 19 suicide-hijackers did. (This reminds me of the good ol'days when we didn't actually know if Nazis were online or not. This prompted Gerard Van der Leun to write a corollary to Godwin's law: "As global connectivity improves, the probability of actual Nazis being on the net approaches one." (http://www.cbbrowne.com/info/godwin.html) --DBM]
********* Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2001 22:07:44 -0700 To: declan () well com, politech () politechbot com From: Lizard <lizard () mrlizard com> Subject: Re: FC: Dutch government moves to limit encryption, citing terrorists Cc: ame () heise de In-Reply-To: <5.0.2.1.0.20011010232513.02636da0 () mail well com>Has anyone yet found a case where some alphabet soup agency had, in hand, an ecrypted file, and said, "We know this file contains some kind of Evil Plot, but we can't tell what it is due to that darn encryption!"?
If so, I'd like to know how they managed to know who to watch, which files to grab, etc, but not enough to just use Tempest or similair technologies (or good old spying!) to GET THE DAMN PASSWORD FROM THE USER.
REAL crackers don't bother with brute-force cracking;they trick the user. Given that terrorists are not the brightest apples in the pond, I can't imagine the same techniques can't be used on them.
*********From a longtime Politech subscriber (obviously I haven't confirmed this myself, so treat it for what it's worth):
You might like to know that Iomart are in financial trouble of the deep-shit-without-a-depth-guauge variety. They're not going bust yet, but they're flailing around in search of a new business model after their colocation business flopped. (Guess who used to be one of their customers?) This sort of nonsense looks like something one of their PR people came up with. (Compare and contrast with the French police reports that they've found some Al Quaida code books ... hand-written in Arabic. Someone is pushing the anti-crypto, anti-stego bandwagon rather hand in the UK right now ...)
********* Subject: RE: U.K. firm finds hidden messages that "might" implicate bin Laden Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2001 23:15:02 -0700 From: "Clinton D. Fein" <clinton.fein () apollomedia com> To: <declan () well com> Cc: <victoria.masterson () businessam co uk> Hats off to Phil Worms, the PR person representing Iomart. He couldn't have wished for a more company focused article had he written the piece himself. "Iomart, headed by the chief executive Angus MacSween, is the only UK company and one of only a handful worldwide which are providing their services free to help the US government's security effort." (Let's not forget Starbucks or Oracle, leaving only two fingers!). It couldn't possibly be that other companies don't have the PR machines in place or are providing services more discreetly rather than risk appearing exploitative of a terrible tragedy. No doubt Iomart's "possible" opening of a US office in Hendon, Virginia, within three months, is to be closer to assist the Pentagon should they need it. Fortuitously enough, we are exploring launching a new product that finds hidden journalism in regurgitated press releases that "might" actually be informative. Perhaps I'll make it available free. Clinton ____________________________ Clinton Fein President ApolloMedia Corporation 370 7th Street, Suite 6 San Francisco, CA 94103 VOX 415-552-7655 FAX 415-552-7656 http://apollomedia.com/ ______________________________ ********* From another Politech subscriber, again, treat this for what it's worth): first something unrelated: http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2000/06/000605-terror.htm (last year already!) iomart has bought the bancrupt company that tried to make a map of the whole internet last year in order to find the source of every message, to fight piracy and brand name and copyright infringement. it's owned by the latter's founder, and has its own share of financial troubles, if i understood correctly what news i found about the two when i looked recently. another company, german biodata, owner of image searcher cobion which has a similar goal of brand name infringement finding (and makes a lot of press releases every once in a while about how they claim this helps find missing children and fight child pornography and nazi symbols), recently had some news about financial woes, too, so in this context i suspect that the demand for this type of service is very, very low - nobody seems to want to run themselves into countless silly legal affairs like "sportswear company adidas sues animal park websites for stripes on tigers and zebras that they say infringe their trade mark", and the investment they all had at their beginnings from three letter orgs in law enforcement or worse seems to have pulled out when they didn't find anything useful there either. here's some stuff i dug out recently upon another announcement of a wondrous "whole web map to fight all evil" in the austrian quintessenz q/depesche list (that was the news about www.gridpatrol.de by hamburg, germany firm "mediatime" on october 4th) : the article at the bottom only survived on my disk, but not even on google, even though it's just one year old. ps:http://www.google.de/search?q=whitelaw+actis&hl=de second find when i looked "cash flow" ;) http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/te/8967/1.html was i think where i originally got the link to it from, but i think it also had a discussion about it on slashdot. www.actis-technology.com ; business family: http://www.businessam.co.uk/TodaysPaper/TodaysArticles/0,2910,28589,00.html (almost fell bancrupt itself in summer, see "receiver called in at buchanan") then here was iomart buying actis http://www.businessam.co.uk/TodaysPaper/TodaysArticles/0,2910,38026,00.html http://www.actis-technology.com/Actis_NI_brochure.pdf webfilter here's da old thang, sorry for totally garbled line breaks : http://people.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT3G54ELIEC&live=true&tagid=IXLAI5JTS7C&useoverridetemplate=IXLUBP2SS7C Special Feature 20 Oct 2000Uncovering the Dark Side of the world
wide web
By Ma
rcus Gibson
In an achievement that is
almost the
equivalent of the
Human Genome project for the
internet, a new Scottish
software company has not only
succeeded in plotting a map
of the world wide web but has also
uncovered its Dark
Side.
The achievement had its beginnings three years ago at a
brainstorming session between a
group of software programmers in Scotland. "How do we
write a program that detects
anything bad that's going on on the internet?" asked
Stephen Whitelaw, former Glasgow
University lecturer and chief executive of Buchanan
International, a security software
company based outside Glasgow.
[...]
**********
Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 01:55:51 -0700
From: "G. Armour Van Horn" <vanhorn () whidbey com>
To: declan () well com
Subject: Re: FC: U.K. firm finds hidden messages that "might" implicate
binLaden
I wouldn't take them seriously at all, and I'd hope that someone is debunking them inside the Beltway. By now the authorities have certainly been able to search the homes of the hijackers, did any of them own computers? If they visited cybercafes or libraries to check for their messages, would they have been able to install the decrypting software for the stego-ed messages? If at libraries, as one of the articles suggests, how could they get the porn through the filters.
And perhaps most telling of all, how would bin Laden, or anyone else in Afghanistan, find a consistent and reliable Internet connection to send from? If it was important to control and coordinate his evil program, as it obviously was, I'm certain that the primary methods would have been chosen with care, and that any communication sent over the Internet would have been less important and/or supplemental.
As always, feel free to use my comments in any way you see fit. Van Van Horn ********** [Below message is humor, for those who don't grok ROT13 --DBM] From: goetz99 () gmx net To: declan () well com Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 10:35:54 +0200Subject: Re: FC: U.K. firm finds hidden messages that "might" implicate bin Laden
u: > In recent weeks, Iomart experts have unearthed hundreds of files, > some of them containing Arabic text and dates which have been > passed on to investigators. a german hacker "group" (really a schizphrenic who counts himself as several) has performed a massive web content filtering using advanced multicluster rot-13 technology on binary files. almost 0.07456843 percent of all binary files over ten megabytes of size were found to contain the name "bin laden". moreover, using dual-rot13 attacks, an overwhelming number even of seemingly plaintext files containing the name "bin laden" IN THE CONTEXT OF RECENT ANTI- US TERRORISM was found on internet servers at the locations 207.25.71.25 and cnn.com . ********** Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 10:03:23 -0400 To: declan () well com From: Brian McWilliams <brian () pc-radio com> Subject: Anti-Terror Hackers Claim Arab National Bank Breach Hi Declan, FYI ...Vigilante hackers apparently penetrated the security of a Saudi bank Wednesday, even as the hackers' own Web site was defaced by a notorious computer prankster, Fluffi Bunni.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/171035.html B. ********** ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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- FC: Are terrorists using crypto and stego? Or is it just media hype? Declan McCullagh (Oct 11)