Tag Archives: espionage

Story of an Undercover CIA Agent who Penetrated Al Qaeda

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/08/story-of-an-undercover-cia-agent-who-penetrated-al-qaeda.html

Rolling Stone has a long investigative story (non-paywalled version here) about a CIA agent who spent years posing as an Islamic radical.

Unrelated, but also in the “real life spies” file: a fake Sudanese diving resort run by Mossad.

The US Is Banning Kaspersky

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/06/the-us-is-banning-kaspersky.html

This move has been coming for a long time.

The Biden administration on Thursday said it’s banning the company from selling its products to new US-based customers starting on July 20, with the company only allowed to provide software updates to existing customers through September 29. The ban—­the first such action under authorities given to the Commerce Department in 2019­—follows years of warnings from the US intelligence community about Kaspersky being a national security threat because Moscow could allegedly commandeer its all-seeing antivirus software to spy on its customers.

Whale Song Code

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/04/whale-song-code.html

During the Cold War, the US Navy tried to make a secret code out of whale song.

The basic plan was to develop coded messages from recordings of whales, dolphins, sea lions, and seals. The submarine would broadcast the noises and a computer—the Combo Signal Recognizer (CSR)—would detect the specific patterns and decode them on the other end. In theory, this idea was relatively simple. As work progressed, the Navy found a number of complicated problems to overcome, the bulk of which centered on the authenticity of the code itself.

The message structure couldn’t just substitute the moaning of a whale or a crying seal for As and Bs or even whole words. In addition, the sounds Navy technicians recorded between 1959 and 1965 all had natural background noise. With the technology available, it would have been hard to scrub that out. Repeated blasts of the same sounds with identical extra noise would stand out to even untrained sonar operators.

In the end, it didn’t work.

Microsoft Is Spying on Users of Its AI Tools

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/02/microsoft-is-spying-on-users-of-its-ai-tools.html

Microsoft announced that it caught Chinese, Russian, and Iranian hackers using its AI tools—presumably coding tools—to improve their hacking abilities.

From their report:

In collaboration with OpenAI, we are sharing threat intelligence showing detected state affiliated adversaries—tracked as Forest Blizzard, Emerald Sleet, Crimson Sandstorm, Charcoal Typhoon, and Salmon Typhoon—using LLMs to augment cyberoperations.

The only way Microsoft or OpenAI would know this would be to spy on chatbot sessions. I’m sure the terms of service—if I bothered to read them—gives them that permission. And of course it’s no surprise that Microsoft and OpenAI (and, presumably, everyone else) are spying on our usage of AI, but this confirms it.

EDITED TO ADD (2/22): Commentary on my use of the word “spying.”

AI and Mass Spying

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/12/ai-and-mass-spying.html

Spying and surveillance are different but related things. If I hired a private detective to spy on you, that detective could hide a bug in your home or car, tap your phone, and listen to what you said. At the end, I would get a report of all the conversations you had and the contents of those conversations. If I hired that same private detective to put you under surveillance, I would get a different report: where you went, whom you talked to, what you purchased, what you did.

Before the internet, putting someone under surveillance was expensive and time-consuming. You had to manually follow someone around, noting where they went, whom they talked to, what they purchased, what they did, and what they read. That world is forever gone. Our phones track our locations. Credit cards track our purchases. Apps track whom we talk to, and e-readers know what we read. Computers collect data about what we’re doing on them, and as both storage and processing have become cheaper, that data is increasingly saved and used. What was manual and individual has become bulk and mass. Surveillance has become the business model of the internet, and there’s no reasonable way for us to opt out of it.

Spying is another matter. It has long been possible to tap someone’s phone or put a bug in their home and/or car, but those things still require someone to listen to and make sense of the conversations. Yes, spyware companies like NSO Group help the government hack into people’s phones, but someone still has to sort through all the conversations. And governments like China could censor social media posts based on particular words or phrases, but that was coarse and easy to bypass. Spying is limited by the need for human labor.

AI is about to change that. Summarization is something a modern generative AI system does well. Give it an hourlong meeting, and it will return a one-page summary of what was said. Ask it to search through millions of conversations and organize them by topic, and it’ll do that. Want to know who is talking about what? It’ll tell you.

The technologies aren’t perfect; some of them are pretty primitive. They miss things that are important. They get other things wrong. But so do humans. And, unlike humans, AI tools can be replicated by the millions and are improving at astonishing rates. They’ll get better next year, and even better the year after that. We are about to enter the era of mass spying.

Mass surveillance fundamentally changed the nature of surveillance. Because all the data is saved, mass surveillance allows people to conduct surveillance backward in time, and without even knowing whom specifically you want to target. Tell me where this person was last year. List all the red sedans that drove down this road in the past month. List all of the people who purchased all the ingredients for a pressure cooker bomb in the past year. Find me all the pairs of phones that were moving toward each other, turned themselves off, then turned themselves on again an hour later while moving away from each other (a sign of a secret meeting).

Similarly, mass spying will change the nature of spying. All the data will be saved. It will all be searchable, and understandable, in bulk. Tell me who has talked about a particular topic in the past month, and how discussions about that topic have evolved. Person A did something; check if someone told them to do it. Find everyone who is plotting a crime, or spreading a rumor, or planning to attend a political protest.

There’s so much more. To uncover an organizational structure, look for someone who gives similar instructions to a group of people, then all the people they have relayed those instructions to. To find people’s confidants, look at whom they tell secrets to. You can track friendships and alliances as they form and break, in minute detail. In short, you can know everything about what everybody is talking about.

This spying is not limited to conversations on our phones or computers. Just as cameras everywhere fueled mass surveillance, microphones everywhere will fuel mass spying. Siri and Alexa and “Hey Google” are already always listening; the conversations just aren’t being saved yet.

Knowing that they are under constant surveillance changes how people behave. They conform. They self-censor, with the chilling effects that brings. Surveillance facilitates social control, and spying will only make this worse. Governments around the world already use mass surveillance; they will engage in mass spying as well.

Corporations will spy on people. Mass surveillance ushered in the era of personalized advertisements; mass spying will supercharge that industry. Information about what people are talking about, their moods, their secrets—it’s all catnip for marketers looking for an edge. The tech monopolies that are currently keeping us all under constant surveillance won’t be able to resist collecting and using all of that data.

In the early days of Gmail, Google talked about using people’s Gmail content to serve them personalized ads. The company stopped doing it, almost certainly because the keyword data it collected was so poor—and therefore not useful for marketing purposes. That will soon change. Maybe Google won’t be the first to spy on its users’ conversations, but once others start, they won’t be able to resist. Their true customers—their advertisers—will demand it.

We could limit this capability. We could prohibit mass spying. We could pass strong data-privacy rules. But we haven’t done anything to limit mass surveillance. Why would spying be any different?

This essay originally appeared in Slate.

Fake Signal and Telegram Apps in the Google Play Store

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/09/fake-signal-and-telegram-apps-in-the-google-play-store.html

Google removed fake Signal and Telegram apps from its Play store.

An app with the name Signal Plus Messenger was available on Play for nine months and had been downloaded from Play roughly 100 times before Google took it down last April after being tipped off by security firm ESET. It was also available in the Samsung app store and on signalplus[.]org, a dedicated website mimicking the official Signal.org. An app calling itself FlyGram, meanwhile, was created by the same threat actor and was available through the same three channels. Google removed it from Play in 2021. Both apps remain available in the Samsung store.

Both apps were built on open source code available from Signal and Telegram. Interwoven into that code was an espionage tool tracked as BadBazaar. The Trojan has been linked to a China-aligned hacking group tracked as GREF. BadBazaar has been used previously to target Uyghurs and other Turkic ethnic minorities. The FlyGram malware was also shared in a Uyghur Telegram group, further aligning it to previous targeting by the BadBazaar malware family.

Signal Plus could monitor sent and received messages and contacts if people connected their infected device to their legitimate Signal number, as is normal when someone first installs Signal on their device. Doing so caused the malicious app to send a host of private information to the attacker, including the device IMEI number, phone number, MAC address, operator details, location data, Wi-Fi information, emails for Google accounts, contact list, and a PIN used to transfer texts in the event one was set up by the user.

This kind of thing is really scary.

China Hacked Japan’s Military Networks

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/08/china-hacked-japans-military-networks.html

The NSA discovered the intrusion in 2020—we don’t know how—and alerted the Japanese. The Washington Post has the story:

The hackers had deep, persistent access and appeared to be after anything they could get their hands on—plans, capabilities, assessments of military shortcomings, according to three former senior U.S. officials, who were among a dozen current and former U.S. and Japanese officials interviewed, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

[…]

The 2020 penetration was so disturbing that Gen. Paul Nakasone, the head of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, and Matthew Pottinger, who was White House deputy national security adviser at the time, raced to Tokyo. They briefed the defense minister, who was so concerned that he arranged for them to alert the prime minister himself.

Beijing, they told the Japanese officials, had breached Tokyo’s defense networks, making it one of the most damaging hacks in that country’s modern history.

More analysis.

The US Is Spying on the UN Secretary General

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/06/the-us-is-spying-on-the-un-secretary-general.html

The Washington Post is reporting that the US is spying on the UN Secretary General.

The reports on Guterres appear to contain the secretary general’s personal conversations with aides regarding diplomatic encounters. They indicate that the United States relied on spying powers granted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to gather the intercepts.

Lots of details about different conversations in the article, which are based on classified documents leaked on Discord by Jack Teixeira.

There will probably a lot of faux outrage at this, but spying on foreign leaders is a perfectly legitimate use of the NSA’s capabilities and authorities. (If the NSA didn’t spy on the UN Secretary General, we should fire it and replace it with a more competent NSA.) It’s the bulk surveillance of whole populations that should outrage us.

Chinese Hacking of US Critical Infrastructure

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/05/chinese-hacking-of-us-critical-infrastructure.html

Everyone is writing about an interagency and international report on Chinese hacking of US critical infrastructure.

Lots of interesting details about how the group, called Volt Typhoon, accesses target networks and evades detection.

FBI Disables Russian Malware

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/05/fbi-disables-russian-malware.html

Reuters is reporting that the FBI “had identified and disabled malware wielded by Russia’s FSB security service against an undisclosed number of American computers, a move they hoped would deal a death blow to one of Russia’s leading cyber spying programs.”

The headline says that the FBI “sabotaged” the malware, which seems to be wrong.

Presumably we will learn more soon.

EDITED TO ADD: New York Times story.

EDITED TO ADD: Maybe “sabotaged” is the right word. The FBI hacked the malware so that it disabled itself.

Despite the bravado of its developers, Snake is among the most sophisticated pieces of malware ever found, the FBI said. The modular design, custom encryption layers, and high-caliber quality of the code base have made it hard if not impossible for antivirus software to detect. As FBI agents continued to monitor Snake, however, they slowly uncovered some surprising weaknesses. For one, there was a critical cryptographic key with a prime length of just 128 bits, making it vulnerable to factoring attacks that expose the secret key. This weak key was used in Diffie-Hellman key exchanges that allowed each infected machine to have a unique key when communicating with another machine.

Russian Cyberwarfare Documents Leaked

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/03/russian-cyberwarfare-documents-leaked.html

Now this is interesting:

Thousands of pages of secret documents reveal how Vulkan’s engineers have worked for Russian military and intelligence agencies to support hacking operations, train operatives before attacks on national infrastructure, spread disinformation and control sections of the internet.

The company’s work is linked to the federal security service or FSB, the domestic spy agency; the operational and intelligence divisions of the armed forces, known as the GOU and GRU; and the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence organisation.

Lots more at the link.

The documents are in Russian, so it will be a while before we get translations.

EDITED TO ADD (4/1): More information.

Real-World Steganography

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/01/real-world-steganography.html

From an article about Zheng Xiaoqing, an American convicted of spying for China:

According to a Department of Justice (DOJ) indictment, the US citizen hid confidential files stolen from his employers in the binary code of a digital photograph of a sunset, which Mr Zheng then mailed to himself.

NSA Employee Charged with Espionage

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/10/nsa-employee-charged-with-espionage.html

An ex-NSA employee has been charged with trying to sell classified data to the Russians (but instead actually talking to an undercover FBI agent).

It’s a weird story, and the FBI affidavit raises more questions than it answers. The employee only worked for the NSA for three weeks—which is weird in itself. I can’t figure out how he linked up with the undercover FBI agent. It’s not clear how much of this was the employee’s idea, and whether he was goaded by the FBI agent. Still, hooray for not leaking NSA secrets to the Russians. (And, almost ten years after Snowden, do we still have this much trouble vetting people before giving them security clearances?)

Mr. Dalke, who had already left the N.S.A. but told the agent that he still worked there on a temporary assignment, then revealed that had taken “highly sensitive information” related to foreign targeting of U.S. systems and information on cyber operations, the prosecutors said. He offered the information in exchange for cryptocurrency and said he was in “financial need.” Court records show he had nearly $84,000 in debt between student loans and credit cards.

EDITED TO ADD (10/5): Marcy Wheeler notes that the FBI seems to be sitting on some common recruitment point, and collecting potential Russian spies.

Security Vulnerabilities in Covert CIA Websites

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/09/security-vulnerabilities-in-covert-cia-websites.html

Back in 2018, we learned that covert system of websites that the CIA used for communications was compromised by—at least—China and Iran, and that the blunder caused a bunch of arrests, imprisonments, and executions. We’re now learning that the CIA is still “using an irresponsibly secured system for asset communication.”

Citizen Lab did the research:

Using only a single website, as well as publicly available material such as historical internet scanning results and the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, we identified a network of 885 websites and have high confidence that the United States (US) Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) used these sites for covert communication.

The websites included similar Java, JavaScript, Adobe Flash, and CGI artifacts that implemented or apparently loaded covert communications apps. In addition, blocks of sequential IP addresses registered to apparently fictitious US companies were used to host some of the websites. All of these flaws would have facilitated discovery by hostile parties.

[…]

The bulk of the websites that we discovered were active at various periods between 2004 and 2013. We do not believe that the CIA has recently used this communications infrastructure. Nevertheless, a subset of the websites are linked to individuals who may be former and possibly still active intelligence community employees or assets:

  • Several are currently abroad
  • Another left mainland China in the timeframe of the Chinese crackdown
  • Another was subsequently employed by the US State Department
  • Another now works at a foreign intelligence contractor

Citizen Lab is not publishing details, of course.

When I was a kid, I thought a lot about being a spy. And this, right here, was the one thing I worried about. It didn’t matter how clever and resourceful I was. If my handlers were incompetent, I was dead.

Another news article.

EDITED TO ADD (10/2): Slashdot thread.

Cold War Bugging of Soviet Facilities

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/09/cold-war-bugging-of-soviet-facilities.html

Found documents in Poland detail US spying operations against the former Soviet Union.

The file details a number of bugs found at Soviet diplomatic facilities in Washington, D.C., New York, and San Francisco, as well as in a Russian government-owned vacation compound, apartments used by Russia personnel, and even Russian diplomats’ cars. And the bugs were everywhere: encased in plaster in an apartment closet; behind electrical and television outlets; bored into concrete bricks and threaded into window frames; inside wooden beams and baseboards and stashed within a building’s foundation itself; surreptitiously attached to security cameras; wired into ceiling panels and walls; and secretly implanted into the backseat of cars and in their window panels, instrument panels, and dashboards. It’s an impressive—­ and impressively thorough—­ effort by U.S. counterspies.

We have long read about sophisticated Russian spying operations—bugging the Moscow embassy, bugging Selectric typewriters in the Moscow embassy, bugging the new Moscow embassy. These are the first details I’ve read about the US bugging the Russians’ embassy.

Microsoft Issues Report of Russian Cyberattacks against Ukraine

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/04/microsoft-issues-report-of-russian-cyberattacks-against-ukraine.html

Microsoft has a comprehensive report on the dozens of cyberattacks — and even more espionage operations — Russia has conducted against Ukraine as part of this war:

At least six Russian Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actors and other unattributed threats, have conducted destructive attacks, espionage operations, or both, while Russian military forces attack the country by land, air, and sea. It is unclear whether computer network operators and physical forces are just independently pursuing a common set of priorities or actively coordinating. However, collectively, the cyber and kinetic actions work to disrupt or degrade Ukrainian government and military functions and undermine the public’s trust in those same institutions.

[…]

Threat groups with known or suspected ties to the GRU have continuously developed and used destructive wiper malware or similarly destructive tools on targeted Ukrainian networks at a pace of two to three incidents a week since the eve of invasion. From February 23 to April 8, we saw evidence of nearly 40 discrete destructive attacks that permanently destroyed files in hundreds of systems across dozens of organizations in Ukraine.

US Critical Infrastructure Companies Will Have to Report When They Are Hacked

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/03/us-critical-infrastructure-companies-will-have-to-report-when-they-are-hacked.html

This will be law soon:

Companies critical to U.S. national interests will now have to report when they’re hacked or they pay ransomware, according to new rules approved by Congress.

[…]

The reporting requirement legislation was approved by the House and the Senate on Thursday and is expected to be signed into law by President Joe Biden soon. It requires any entity that’s considered part of the nation’s critical infrastructure, which includes the finance, transportation and energy sectors, to report any “substantial cyber incident” to the government within three days and any ransomware payment made within 24 hours.

Even better would be if they had to report it to the public.

Amy Zegart on Spycraft in the Internet Age

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/02/amy-zegart-on-spycraft-in-the-internet-age.html

Amy Zegart has a new book: Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence. Wired has an excerpt:

In short, data volume and accessibility are revolutionizing sensemaking. The intelligence playing field is leveling­ — and not in a good way. Intelligence collectors are everywhere, and government spy agencies are drowning in data. This is a radical new world and intelligence agencies are struggling to adapt to it. While secrets once conferred a huge advantage, today open source information increasingly does. Intelligence used to be a race for insight where great powers were the only ones with the capabilities to access secrets. Now everyone is racing for insight and the internet gives them tools to do it. Secrets still matter, but whoever can harness all this data better and faster will win.

The third challenge posed by emerging technologies strikes at the heart of espionage: secrecy. Until now, American spy agencies didn’t have to interact much with outsiders, and they didn’t want to. The intelligence mission meant gathering secrets so we knew more about adversaries than they knew about us, and keeping how we gathered secrets a secret too.

[…]

In the digital age, however, secrecy is bringing greater risk because emerging technologies are blurring nearly all the old boundaries of geopolitics. Increasingly, national security requires intelligence agencies to engage the outside world, not stand apart from it.

I have not yet read the book.