ウェブ忍者が失敗する : Dox-ing, Disinformation, and The Fifth Battlespace

Digital Ninja Fail: ウェブ忍者が失敗する

The recent arrests of alleged key members of LulzSec and Anonymous have been called into question by the ‘Web Ninja’s‘, a group of would be hackers who have been ‘DOX-ing” the anonymous hierarchy for some time now. Yesterday, they posted the following on their page concerning the arrest of a man from the Shetland Islands who is purported to be ‘Topiary‘ by the Met and SOCA.

Now, this is a bold statement for anyone who really knows what they are doing in the intelligence analysis field. So, it is my supposition that these guys have no clue about what they are doing by making bold assertions like this. The data they have is tenuous at best and by making such bold statements, I have to wonder if indeed the so called ‘Ninja’s” themselves might not be a tool of anonymous to in fact sow that disinformation.

Here are the facts as I see them;

• To date, the federal authorities have not questioned anyone who was DOX’d by the Ninja’s that I am aware of
• The individuals who were DOX’d that were investigated by the authorities were in fact outed by LulzSec/Anonymous themselves
• Adrian Chen has spoken to the person that the Ninja’s have fingered and claims that he (said person) went to the authorities himself. So far he is still not a suspect.

So, taking into account these facts, I would have to say that the Ninja’s have failed in their stated mission so far and I would suffice to say that if they are indeed a part of a disinformation campaign, then that too has failed. After all, the police seem to be ignoring the data put on the interent by the likes of the Ninja’s in favour of other tried and true tactics. The primary tactic as I see it, is grab one individual and then get them to roll over on their compatriots in the face of massive jail time.

This pretty much works all the time as we, as human beings, are most willing to sacrifice others for the self. In the case of the likes of LulzSec skiddies, I would have to say that the ages of the players, and their generational tendencies will allow them to cut deals pretty quickly. It’s my assessment that they are in it for the self gratification and lulz, not for the altruism that the LulzSec and Anonymous press releases have been trying to have one believe. My assumption is that if indeed the 19 year old guy they popped in Scotland is involved with LulzSec, and is in fact Topiary, he will roll over soon enough.

I also believe that these are all untrained operatives and they have made and will make more mistakes. I am pretty sure that the alleged “leaderless” group has leaders AND that unlike a true guerrilla warfare cell, will know the other players personal details. Essentially, they have had no compartmentalisation and they will all fall eventually though interrogation and deal making. As I said before, the insider threat to the organisation is key here, and it was this idea I think the Ninja’s had.. Well, at least that was the original idea of the Ninja Warrior. They were spies who infiltrated the ranks and destroyed from within.

So far with these guys.. Not so much.

Welcome To Spook World: Disinformation Campaigns and Intelligence Analysis

Now, on the whole disinformation thing, I know that the Lulz and Anonymous have said that they are using disinformation as well to try and create a smoke screen. Frankly, all of the intelligence out there that is open source is suspect. Maltego map’s of end user names as I have shown in the past can be useful in gathering intelligence… Sometimes. For the most part, if a user keeps using a screen name in many places and ties that name to real data, then they can be tracked, but, it takes a lot of analysis and data gathering to do it. Though, many of the foot soldiers within the Anon movement are young and foolish enough to just keep using the same screen names for everything so there is a higher likelihood that the data being pulled up on Maltego and with Google searches is solid enough to make some justified conclusions.

With the more experienced people though, there has been some forethought and they have protected their identities as best they could. What became their real downfall was that they could not rise above petty infighting and dox-ing each other. Thus you have the start of the potential domino effect on the core group as well as anyone who has any peripheral affiliation with the Lulz. Be assured, those who have been pinched are giving up as many names as possible as well as whatever is on their hard drives, Anon hacker manuals or not. All of these scenarios lead to the conclusion of more arrests by the authorities and even more skiddies getting into legal trouble around the globe. Meanwhile though, if the core group has been smart, then perhaps the leaders will skate for a time, using the masses as canon fodder.

Gee kids.. Did you know that you were all expendable?

On another tac, I would like to speak about the potential of the disinformation campaigns being perpetrated by the authorities as well. Consider that the trained professionals out there who are hunting these characters (Topiary, Sabu, et al.) are also adept at using not only the technologies of the fifth battlespace, but also the training afforded them in ‘spook world’ This means disinformation campaigns, mole hunts, and insurgencies of their own, getting to the inner core of Anonymous and Lulz. Now, that there were six (alleged) lulzer’s it would be more difficult to do, especially if those LulzSec folks really do know one another (as they claim they do not, which, I just don’t buy.. Remember the compartmentalisation issue) The agent provocateur’s are out there I am sure and with each rung of the ladder, they get closer to the core group.

That is unless the core group falls apart on their own and DOX’s each other out. In the end, I am going to suggest that the authorities will use all of the tricks of the trade on the Anon/Lulz folks to bag them… And with concerted effort by government resources, they will get their men/women.

Untrained, Unruly, and Unprofessional Operators:

“Discretion is the better part of valour” as they say, and in the case of the Lulz and Anon crews, they seem to not have a clue. Perhaps the Lulz think that by being unruly and unpredictable to a certain amount, will be just the cover they need, but, I think that their lack of discretion will be their undoing as well as their hubris. Had many of these folks had some real training, they might have just stood down for a while (not just a week or so) after setting sail into the sunset.

As I have said before, it was a bad idea to recruit and have comm’s out in the open on IRC servers even if they had ‘invite only’ channels. As is being seen now, someone (jester perhaps) has taken down their servers again after other outages due to Ryan Cleary’s attack and pressure from the government on those connection sources that the Anon’s were using. I am sure the idea was to have a movement that could also serve as diversion for the core users as well as to LOIC, but this all failed in the end didn’t it? The LOIC is what has given the FBI the 1,000 IP addresses as a hit list, so to speak, that they are now using to collect people and charge them for the DD0S attacks.

Had these people been trained or not been so compulsive, they might have had more of a chance to keep this up for a much much longer time. As I write, the Lulz do continue, but they have slowed quite a bit since the arrests started again. This I think is because the cages are starting to get rattled and people are finally coming to the conclusion that some discretion is needed to not end up Bubba’s play pal in prison. It’s a learning curve, and likely going to be a painful one for the kiddies.

Unprofessional actions within this area of battle will end up with your being put in jail kids.

To end this section I would also like to add this thought. My assessment of the Lulz core group is this;

• They were drunk on the power of their escapades
• The more followers they had and more attention, the less risk averse they became
• They seem to have compulsion disorders (don’t say it.. Aspergers!) that seem to not allow them to lay low (until now it seems)
• The ego has eaten their id altogether
• Base ages are within the teens with a couple over 20

Technical Issues Within The Fifth Battlespace:

Another BIG issue within this battlespace is the technology. The Anon’s and Lulz have been ascribing to the idea of “Proxies, we haz them! So we’re secure!” and to a certain extent they are right. There are always ways around that though and certainly leaks in data (such as the TOR leaks that have happened) that could lead someone to locate the end user behind the proxy, so they are not fool proof. Certainly not if the fool in question is some skiddie 12 year old using LOIC un-proxied and not obfuscated while they D0S Paypal.

The problem is that the technology could fail you as well as the untrained operative could make small and large mistakes that could lead authorities right back to their IP and home accts. On the other side of that equation is that when properly done, it is damn hard to prove a lot in hacking cases because of obfuscation, as well as mis-configured end systems that have been hit. I cannot tell you how many times I have seen incidents play out where the target systems had no logging on as well as being completely un-secured, thus leaving practically nothing for a forensics team to find and use.

Once again, this brings us back to the insider threat, whether they be the insider who decides to go turncoat, or, the agent provocateur (i.e. Jester and the Ninja’s as well as others from the authorities) who infiltrate the Lulz and then gut them from the inside. What it really boils all down to is that in the end, it will be the foibles of the Lulz core and the actions of spooks that will bring them down.. And I think they are learning that very fact now.

JIN; One Must Know The Enemies Mind To Be Victorious:

As a last note, I would like to say to the Ninja’s, you need to learn and practice your Kuji-in. It is obvious to me that you have failed on the ‘Jin’ (knowing the opponents mind) with your dox attempts. Until such time as I see people being hauled in that directly relate to your documents posted, then I am going to consider the following to be the case:

1. DOX-ing is mostly useless and takes quite a bit of analysis before just releasing names
2. The Feds are not taking your data as gospel, nor should the general public or media
3. You yourselves may in fact be a tool of Anonymous/Lulz and as such, spewing disinformation
4. You could be right, but by releasing it to the public at large, you are letting the Lulz know to destroy evidence and create obfuscation that will hinder arrests later.

Ninja’s got results.. Not so much for ‘Web’ Ninjas. At least Jester, if his claims are true, is breaking their C&C channels lately.. Which has its own problematic issues.. Just like his meddling in the Jihadi area, but, that’s a story for another time.

K.

Team Inject0r: The Multinational Connection

The recent compromise of a NATO server by “Team Inj3ct0r” has recently made the news, but, as the media usually do, they did not look any deeper than the website for Inj3ct0r and perhaps a little data as to what the team said in a text doc on the compromised server. A further examination of the group shows that Inj3ctor has been around since 2008, and has ties to Chinese hackers as well as Russia, Turkey and other countries.

This could change the paradigm on the “hacktivism” moniker that Team Inj3ctor has branded themselves with recently (post the goings on with Anonymous and LulzSec/Antisec movements) Before these movements, this site and the teams all were loosely linked and purveyors of 0day, and not so much in it for any political means. What has changed? Who might benefit here to use the hacktivism movement as a cover for hacking activities that could cause a stir?

… Maybe the PLA? Maybe the FSB?…Some other political orgs from Gaza? or Turkey?

Or, perhaps they are just a bunch of hackers who like the cause celebre of hacktivism? It’s hard to say really, but, when you get China into the mix, the lines blur very very fast.

Below I am outlining the data I collected on the main inj3ct0r site, its owner, and two of the players who are on both teams of hackers that span China and Russian hacking. This makes for a new wrinkle in the Anonymous/Lulz movement in that the NATO hack was claimed by someone using the name “Team Inj3ct0r” and this site seems to fit the bill as the source of the attack since it has been quoted by the hackers that they used 0day on the NATO server to crack it and keep access. If indeed there are connections to state sponsored hacking (as the China connection really does lead me to believe) then we have a new problem, or perhaps this has been the case all along that the state sponsored hackers have been within Anonymous, using them as cover.

Another interesting fact is the decision to attack NATO. Was it a hack of opportunity? Or was there a political motive here? As I have seen that these groups are multi-national, perhaps this attack had a overall political agenda in that NATO is supposed to be the worlds policeman. I am still unsure.

Teams and Members:

In looking at the sites and the members, it came to light that two members belong to each of the teams (inj3ct0r and DIS9) The two are “knockout” and “Kalashinkov3” The teams are tied together in the way they present their pages and the data they mirror so it is assumed that they have a greater connection underneath. In fact, more of them may be working together without being named in the teams listed below. Each of these people have particular skills and finding 0day and posting them to this site and others for others to use.

Team Inj3ct0r: http://77.120.120.218/team

Team Inj3ct0r’s site is located in Ukraine and is registered to a Matt Farrell (mr.r0073r@gmail.com) My assumption is that the name given as well as the address and phone numbers are just bogus as you can see they like to use the netspeak word “1337” quite a bit. A secondary tip on this is that the name “Matt Farrel” is the character name for the hacker in “Live Free or Die Hard” Someone’s a fan…

Team Inj3ct0r

r0073r – r0073r is the founder of inj3ct0r and I believe is Russian. The site r0073r.com owned by Mr. Czeslaw Borski according to whois. However, a whois of inj3ctor.com comes up with a Anatoly Burdenko of 43 Moskow Moskovskaya Oblast RU. Email: e-c-h-0@mail.ru

• The domain r0073r.com owned by a Mr. Czeslaw Borski out of Gdansk Poland (another red herring name) domain hosted in Germany with a .ru name server
• The domain inj3ct0r.com created in 2008 belongs to Anatoly Burdenko and has been suspended
• The domain inject0r.com was hosted in China  61.191.0.0 – 61.191.255.255 on China net
• Another site confirms that r0073r is the founder of team inj3ct0r aka l33tday
• Another alias seems to be the screen name str0ke
• Also owned www.0xr00t.com

http://www.inj3ct0r.com domain details:

Registrant:
Inj3ct0r LTD
r0073r        (e-c-h-0@mail.ru)
Burdenko, 43
Moskow
Moskovskaya oblast,119501
RU
Tel. +7.4959494151
Creation Date: 13-Dec-2008
Expiration Date: 13-Dec-2013
Domain servers in listed order:
ns1.suspended-domain.com
ns2.suspended-domain.com
Administrative Contact:
Inj3ct0r LTD
r0073r        (e-c-h-0@mail.ru)
Burdenko, 43
Moskow
Moskovskaya oblast,119501
RU
Tel. +7.4959494151                     

Sid3^effectsr

4dc0reSeeMe

XroGuE

gunslinger_

indoushka
KnocKout

• knockout@e-mail.com.tr
• knockoutr@msn.com
• Alleged to be Turkish and located in Istanbul
• Member of the Turkish cyber warrior site cyber-warrior.org last access July 4rth 2011

ZoRLu
anT!-Tr0J4n
eXeSoul
KedAns-Dz
^Xecuti0n3r
Kalashinkov3

• Claims to be from Algeria
• kalashinkov3[at]Hotmail[dot]Fr
• http://internetblog.pl/tag/kalashinkov3/
• He’s a member of GazaHackers 

DIS9.com:

DIS9.com is a hacker group that is linked to and shares two members with Team Inj3ct0r (Kalashinkov3 and KnocKout) Both sites are very similar in design and content. DIS9.com resolves to an address in China and is registered to a YeAilin ostensibly out of Hunan Province in China. The owner/registrar of the site has a familiar email address of yeailin225@126.com also a domain registered and physically in China.

A Maltego of this data presents the following interesting bits: A connection to the site http://www.vi-xi.com a now defunct bbs which lists the yeailin225 account and other data like his QQ account. This site also lists another name attached to him: Daobanan ( 版主 )  vi-xi.com had hacking discussions that involved 0day as well. The domain of vi-xi.com was registered to jiang wen shuai with an email address of jwlslm@126.com and listed it out of Hunan Province.

The connections from DIS9 to other known hackers who are state actors was found within the Maltego maps and analogous Google searches. As yet, I am still collecting the data out there because there is so much of it. I have been inundated with links and user names, so once I have more detailed findings I will post them. Suffice to say though, that there is enough data here to infer that at the very least, hackers who work for the state in China are working with others on these two sites at the very least, sharing 0day and perhaps hacking together as newly branded “hactivists”

DIS9 Team:
Rizky Ariestiyansyah
Blackrootkit – 
Kedans-Dz

: Team Exploit :

Nick
Kalashinkov3
KnocKout
K4pt3N
Liquid
Backdoor Draft

h4x0er.org aka DIS9 Team

Another interesting fact is that a link to the site h4x0er.org itself shows that the DIS9 team is the umbrella org for Inj3ct0r and other teams. This is a common practice I have found with the Chinese hacking groups to have interconnected sites and teams working together. This looks to be the case here too, and I say this because of the Chinese connections that keep turning up in the domains, sites, and team members.

Other Teams within the DIS9 umbrella:

• ID Backtrack Team
• FreeBUF Team
• Inj3ct0r Team
• r0eXpeR Team
• Rsoul Team
• Vim0x0n
• Nuclear’Atk

In the end, it seems that there is more to the inj3ct0r team than just some random hackers and all of this data bears this out. I guess we will just have to wait and see what else they hit and determine what their agenda is.

More when I have it…

K.

LulzSec: How NOT To Run An Insurgency

Oh how the Lulz turn…

Lulzsec seems to be imploding a bit with the pressure put on them by their own interpersonal issues as well as the likes of Th3j35t3r and the Web Ninja’s on their backs as well. I however, would like to point out the Lulz tactical failures that are directly leading to their ultimate party van special that seems to be coming soon. I say ‘seems’ to be coming because who really knows what will happen. Perhaps some of these guys will actually skate because they were smart enough to keep some of their personal details.. well.. personal.. Maybe not though as is evidenced by the ‘doxing pastebin-palooza’ of late.

Secrecy is important:

LulzSec seems to have misunderstood that secrecy is really really important when you are doing something like a digital insurgency. Sure, you can try to rely on all the technologies like proxies to hide your IP, but, you also have the human element to contend with. It is here where the Lulz have not thought things out too clearly. They attempted to use the Anonymous model, but, unlike Anonymous, they, had a smaller crew and a central core that, well, has been rather chatty. Chatty mind you, on IRC channels that have been compromised and monitored.

Loose lips sink ships.. Yeah, I went there…

Nope, while Lulzsec has been attempting to be secret, they failed to follow through and actually carry out their insurgency behind a wall of utter secrecy or even a cell based infrastructure it seems. Of course most of these efforts have been planed out and talked about on said IRC channels (even the sooper sekret ones) and advertised so others could revel in the lulz.

This and the other things I am going to mention will be their undoing.

Communications Should be COVERT:

Ok, so,  how long did Osama have runners with USB keys on donkey’s going to Peshawar Internet cafe’s without being caught? Oh, yeah, 10 friggin years! It took the CIA a long time to catch on to the runners/couriers and even then they did so only from a VERY FEW pieces of hard SIGINT. The key here kids is that the AQ guys were practising ‘tradecraft’ unlike the Lulzsec kids. They took pains to insure that their communications were not easily picked up by the NSA or anyone else listening and watching.

You guys in Lulzsec? Not so much….

Instead, you have relied on technology to keep you safe while flagrantly whipping out your collective pee pee’s and waving them at forces who are much better equipped, trained, and funded to hunt you down and make you go bye bye. Some might see that as daring… Others see it as just plain stupid. Either way, since you have failed to use real covert channels that you do not advertise, you have highly increased the likelihood that you will soon see those party van’s you speak of so often (mockingly) in your yards as they start taking all your computers out the door, and you to the local orange jump suit palace.

Next time, just have your meetings in the parking lot of the local PD. It will cut out the middle man.

Ego is the mind killer:

I must not have too much Ego. Ego is the mind-killer. Ego is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my Ego. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the Ego has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Ah yes, I have been ruminating on this one for some time and even adjusted this quote from Dune, which I think fits nicely. Your ego’s have been writing checks that you aren’t likely to want to have cashed kids. You have said that you do it for the lulz, you have also made intimations that its about how poor security is within the internet ecology, but, I think mainly your motivations have been ego driven. What this means is that you are getting quite the buzz off of being so darn smart and snarky. You have been having fun poking the badgers in the eyes and feeling invincible.

Well, you aren’t geniuses and you aren’t invincible. Eventually everyone gets caught, especially those who do not take care to cover their tracks and act smartly.

Simply, your ego’s have done you in… Be sure to check that ego at the door to the federal penitentiary that will be your new home, because there are bigger and nastier people in there who will be trading you for smokes soon. Oh, and remember to buy a lot of tucks pads.. You are going to need them.

Untrustworthy Assets Should NOT be Trusted With Operational Details:

This brings me to the bust of your minimally affiliated IRC op Ryan. It seems from all of the press and from the kids history, that he was unstable to start. This is the guy you want to trust with any data, no matter how small, on who Lulzsec is and how they operate?

Really?

Well then, who else do you have running your servers and running errands? Because I think they are likely to be just as whacked as Ryan and likely to be caught and roll within the first few minutes of interrogation!

Bravo, well done!

If you guys had any operational smarts, you would have to know that you cannot trust anyone with the whole picture. You pretty much are claiming that now after his arrest, but I think secretly you are all leaving fudge stains in your pants presently. According to the police Ryan had A LOT of data laying round and how are you to know who he talked to and how much he really knew about you all? Even IF you tried to be as careful as possible, you more than likely slipped up and gave him information that he will be giving.. Nope.. wait.. HAS GIVEN to the FBI and the Met.

Another failure on your part in the game of insurgency… I guess you will learn the hard way. Just as you will learn that outing your pals yourselves because they decided they wanted out, or did something to piss you off, will only lead back to you. Not the smartest of moves should any of these guys have data on you that they can use to turn against you.

“Never burn an asset unless you burn them and then shoot them between the eyes.. Or they will come back at you”

LulzSec Fall Down.. Go BOOM:

Finally, as if you could not tell from everything I said above, you are going to go down and likely go down hard. It will be a learning experience for you and for everyone else who wants to let their ego run free to gather 220K of followers on twitter by poking the badger. I am imagining that Ryan and his volumes of digital data, are being disseminated throughout the community of Feds and other agencies as I write…

Oh well, like I said, there’d daring and then there is stupid… Remember what John Keating said in “Dead Poets”

“Phone call from God. If it had been collect, that would have been daring!”

Be seeing you soon as your being put in the back of the party van kids…

K.

The PrimorisEra Affair: Paradigms In Social Networking and SECOPS

EDIT 5.24.2011

As of last night, I had heard that PrimorisEra was back and posting to a new blog. Today Wired has fired off a follow up to the earlier report and her return. It seems from the report that perhaps the Pentagon investigation is over and that in fact Shawna Gorman may indeed be the First Lady of Missiles. It remains to be seen if this is really the case but since she is back and blogging, I would have to lean toward my assessment from before. Still though, my cautionary statements about social networking and SECOPS still apply.

See below:

K.

From Wired:

It started out with a leggy, bikini-clad avatar. She said she was a missile expert — the “1st Lady of Missiles,” in fact — but sometimes suggested she worked with the CIA. With multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts, she earned a following of social media-crazed security wonks. Then came the accusations of using sex appeal for espionage.

Now everyone involved in this weird network is adjusting their story in one way or another, demonstrating that even people in the national security world have trouble remembering one of the basic rules of the internet: Not everyone is who they say they are.

“I think anyone puts pictures out online to lure someone in,” the woman at the center of the controversy insists. “But it’s not to lure men in to give me any information at all… I liked them. They’re pretty. Apparently everyone else thought so too.”

This is a strange, Twitter-borne tale of flirting, cutouts, and lack of online caution in the intelligence and defense worlds. Professionals who should’ve known better casually disclosed their personal details (a big no-no in spook circles) and lobbed allegations they later couldn’t or wouldn’t support (a big no-no in all circles). It led to a Pentagon investigation. And it starts with a Twitter account that no longer exists called @PrimorisEra.

Yesterday, Wired posted a news article about another potential social networking attack on the .mil and .gov types involving Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz. The snippet above really sums up what is alleged to have happened and the problems with Social media’s blasé attitudes where people who have jobs that require secrecy meet and chat.

Presently, according to the article, a Pentagon investigation is under way into this story, but once again, this is not the first time we have heard this type of story in the press with these same players. It was last year when a profile online named “Robin Sage” made the rounds on LinkedIn and other social media formats. This “cutout” as they are called in the espionage community, was in fact a fake profile used by a security researcher to prove a point. By using an attractive woman as the persona, the researcher was able to get people within the military and governmental community to add her and flirt. Through the flirting, the unsuspecting connections gave up valuable data on what they did for a living, where they were, and perhaps even locations in country around the battlefield in Afghanistan.

Many just fell for the profile hook line and sinker.. And that is a bad thing for anyone in this sector. It was a lesson in OPSEC and it’s failure. Potentially, this emerging case from the Wired story could also be much the same. The number of online personae that are involved in this story are just a little too many to just think that it was an innocent mistake on the part of a young woman seeking attention online from her peers within the government and military. However, its also just as possible that that is all it really is.

Time will tell.

Shawn Elizabeth Gorman Daughter of Nancy Gorman 1983

Site with SEG photo (1983)

The thing about this is that this type of exploit is not new at all. This is commonly known as a honeypot in the espionage area and before there was an Internet, there was the local cafe or bar, where one would just happen to meet a lovely young thing and start a relationship. That relationship would then be turned into blackmail (either emotional or literal) and suddenly, you are an asset for the adversary. The new twist is that services need not deploy an asset to a foreign country to search for and find access to those who they want to get information from. Today all they need to have is an Internet connection and Google. It is only even more easily carried out now that there are Social Media sites like Facebook and others to sidle digitally up to anyone you like and start to work on them if you know how.

There used to be a time where every operator was given the tutorials on espionage means and methods. People were forewarned about travelling to other countries and if you are cleared, you have to report suspicious contacts to the DSS. Today though, I don’t think that they have even attempted to try this with online content. I mean, how many reports a day would you have to make to DSS if you are online and just talking to people in a chat room or on Facebook? It would be impossible. So it is understandable, as social animals, that we develop this technology to connect with others and being that it is a rather insular means of communications, feel that we can just let loose with information. After all, how does one really assure that who they are talking to is indeed that person that they claim to be?

So, people forget and really, this is still all relatively new isn’t it? There are no maps here.

Now, back to this story, no one has claimed that data has been leaked. It is only the appearance of things have set off the alarm bells for people and agencies. When one user finally decided to call the alleged cutout’s profile out, a subsequent shit storm began that ended up with @primosera deleting their Twitter, Facebook, and Google accounts thus making the story seem even more suspect.

Was Shawn E Gorman a cutout? Is she really the grad student and contractor she claims to be in her tweets? What about the allusions to the CIA? All of the missile tech and political discussions? Well, given the background of what can be located readily online, there is a Shawn Elizabeth Gorman attending Johns Hopkins as a research assistant getting her MBA in Government, so, perhaps. Or maybe someone has just taken on the persona of Ms. Gorman to use as a cutout for these activities?

Frankly, I am leaning toward it really being her. As you can see from the photos above, I located a photo other than the one from Wired that purports to be Shawn E. Gorman born 1983 to a Nancy Gorman. I also located data that shows a Shawn E. Gorman living in Bethesda MD with the same mother. Given that the photo is an early one, and one of the few out there easily found, I am thinking it is one in the same. However, this does not mean that it has been her behind that keyboard when she was talking to all of the people involved.

Time will tell what is what once the Pentagon’s investigation gets done. It could be that this is all for naught security wise from the compromise perspective. However, this once again is an object lesson for everyone online. Nevermind if you work in a job that requires security, everyone should be cognisant that when they are online talking to someone that they do not know in real life, are just that much more possibly talking to someone who is not their “friend” and looking to just have a chat. From the common data thief to the corporate spy, we all may have data that someone wants and will be willing to pretend a while to get it.

We want to be social and open as we are social animals… Just so happens that sometimes that is a bad idea.

I think though, that everyone who works in security or within a security centric job space will have to go through some more training in the near future. This is just a warning bell and I think it best that the government and military listen to it. Even as the article goes on to mention, there are restrictions on the military about posting online, but still they cannot deny these people access to the likes of Facebook for morale. It is really playing with fire either way, in denying the access it seems draconian and people will fight it. On the other hand, if you allow it and monitor it, you are damned for monitoring people’s interaction online.

Hell, even the CIA has set up its own social networks within the CIA’s Intranet so people can talk and ostensibly share ideas and data. However, that is on an Intranet that is well protected….

Meanwhile, back on the Internet, we have places like LinkedIn. Sounds like a great idea, networking for jobs and such. Then the .gov and .mil folks all got online and began to show themselves and much of their data in a contained space. So much of a treasure trove is LinkedIn that Anna Chapman (as seen above from her Russian Maxim shoot) was only 2 degrees of separation from me within my network on LinkedIn! She was mining the connections as a sleeper for the SVR and all she had to do was put up a pretty picture and say hi.

For me it comes down to this;

1) If you sign up for these places hide as much of your data as you can.

2) Pay attention to the security measures that the sites have in place.. Or don’t. Facebook has had a terrible record on personal privacy but look how many people they have on there and just how much personal data is available to anyone who can look at the page, even a cached version.

3) When you get invites from people check them out. Use other means than the current site (aka LinkedIn) to do that research. See if you can nail down who they are in reality. Even then, once you are friends, think before you type. You may be giving out data that you personally don’t want anyone to have.

4) Placing too much family data on the Internet is a threat. Anything from Identity theft to outright stalking and physical danger can be the outcome if you make it too easy for someone to get your data.

5) If you suspect that someone you are talking to is not indeed who you think they are, walk away.

6) AND for God’s sake, if you are a guy, in the military or government, or hold a classified status and some hot avatar’d chick starts PM’ing you, its either a bot or it’s likely another cutout. ESPECIALLY if you lay out your life’s story online as to what you do and where you work.

7) Finally, remember what I have repeated over and over again. Whoever you are talking to MAY NOT BE WHO THEY SAY THEY ARE!

Just don’t put that data out there and end up in the hot seat with your job on the line over a little virtual tail.

K.

Anonymous #HQ: Inside The Anonymous Secret War Room

John Cook and Adrian Chen — Dissident members of the internet hacktivist group Anonymous, tired of what they call the mob’s “unpatriotic” ways, have provided law enforcement with chat logs of the group’s leadership planning crimes, as well as what they say are key members’ identities. They also gave them to us.

The chat logs, which cover several days in February immediately after the group hacked into internet security firm HBGary’s e-mail accounts, offer a fascinating look inside the hivemind’s organization and culture.

• Sabu
• Kayla
• Laurelai,
• Avunit,
• Entropy,
• Topiary,
• Tflow
• Marduk
• Metric
• A5h3r4

So, Hubris/A5h3r4/Metric have broken into the inner circle of at least one cell of Anonymous. I say cell because I do not think that these users are the actual full scale leaders of Anonymous, instead, as I have said before, there are cell’s of Anon’s that perform operations sporadically. These folks, if the chat transcripts are true, are the ones just behind the HBGary hack and at least one of them, with the Gawker hack.

Once again, I will reiterate here that I think Anonymous is more like a splinter cell operation than anything else. There is an aegis from the whole as an idea, but, they break off into packs for their personal attacks, or whatever turns them on. They coalesce into a unit when they feel moved to, but, they do not overall, just get together and act without direction on the part or parts of leaders.

The example below of the transcripts for #HQ show that these characters though, are a little high on themselves after the hack on HBG… And you know what happens when you don’t pay attention to the hubris factor. You get cocky and you get burned. As you can see below, some of them are at least nervous about being popped or infiltrated.. Those would be the smart ones…

04:44 <&Sabu> who the fuck wrote that doc
04:45 <&Sabu> remove that shit from existence
04:45 <&Sabu> first off there is no hierachy or leadership, and thus an operations manual is not needed

[snip]

04:46 <&Sabu> shit like this is where the feds will get american anons on rico act abuse and other organized crime laws
04:47 <@Laurelai> yeah well you could have done 100 times more effective shit with HBgary
04:47 <@Laurelai> gratted what we got was good
04:47 <&Sabu> if you’re so fucking talented why didn’t you root them yourselves?
04:47 <@Laurelai> but it could have been done alot better
04:47 <&Sabu> also we had a time restraint
04:48 <&Sabu> and as far as I know, considering I’m the one that did the op, I rooted their boxes, cracked their hashes, owned their emails and social engineered their admins in hours
04:48 <&Sabu> your manual is irrelevent.

[snip]

04:51 <&Sabu> ok who authored this ridiculous “OPERATIONS” doc?
04:51 <@Laurelai> look the guideline isnt for you
04:51 <&Sabu> because I’m about to start owning nigg3rs
04:51 <&marduk> authorized???
04:52 <@Laurelai> its just an idea to kick around
04:52 <@Laurelai> start talking
04:52 <&Sabu> for who? the feds?
04:52 <&marduk> its not any official doc, it is something that Laurelai wrote up.. and it is for.. others
04:52 <&marduk> on anonops
04:52 <&Sabu> rofl
04:52 <@Laurelai> just idea
04:52 <@Laurelai> ideas
04:52 <&Sabu> man
04:52 <&marduk> at least that is how i understand it
04:52 <@Laurelai> to talk over
04:53 <&Sabu> le sigh
04:53 <&marduk> mmmm why are we so in a bad mood?
04:53 <&Sabu> my nigga look at that doc
04:53 <&Sabu> and how ridiculous it is

[snip]

04:54 <&marduk> look, i think it was made with good intentions. and it is nothing you need to follow, if you dont like it, it is your good right
04:55 <&Sabu> no fuck that. its docs like this that WHEN LEAKED makes us look like an ORGANIZED CRIME ORGANIZATION

My observations though have always been that the groups would be infiltrated by someone and then outed. It seems that this may indeed be the case here if the data is indeed real. It seems to me that a certain j35t3r said much the same before, that he could and did indeed infiltrate the ranks, and had their data. Perhaps J has something to do with this? Perhaps not… Still, the principle is sound.

1. Infiltrate
2. Gather INTEL
3. Create maps of connections
4. Report

It would seem also that these guys are liminally aware of the fact that their actions can be seen as a conspiracy and that the government will not only get them on hacks potentially, but also use the conspiracy angle to effectively hogtie them in court. Let me tell you kids, there is no perfect hack… Well unless the target is so inept as to have absolutely no logging and does not even know for a very long time that they had been compromised.. Then the likelihood of being found out is slimmer, but, you guys popped and then outed HBG pretty darn quick.

I am willing to bet there are breadcrumbs.. And, those said breadcrumbs are being looked at by folks at some three letter agencies as I write this. You see kids, you pissed in the wrong pool when it comes to vindictiveness. I agree that HBG was up to bad shit and needed to be stopped, but, look at the types of things they were planning. Do you really think that they are above retaliation in other ways than just legal? After all, they were setting up their own digital plumbers division here huh?

Anyway… Just sayin…

Back on topic here with the Backtrace folks and the logs. I have looked at the screen names given and have come to the conclusion that they are all generic enough that I could not get a real lock on anything with Maltego. I had some interesting things pop up when you link them all together, but, overall not enough to do anything meaningful. The other issue is that Maltego, like any tool using search engines and data points, became clogged with new relational data from the articles going wide. I hate it when the data is muddied because of this.

So, yeah, these names are not unique enough to give solid hits. Others though who have been re-using nicks online as well as within the confines of Anonops, well that is another story. I just have this feeling that there are larger drift nets out there now hoovering all you say and do on those anon sites, even if they are in the .eu space. I still have to wonder if any of those IRC servers have been compromised yet by certain intelligence agencies.

One wonders too if China might also be playing in this area… How better to sow discontent and destabilize than to use a proxy like Anonymous for operations?

For that matter.. How about the CIA?

NSA?

Think on it… Wouldn’t Anonymous make a perfect false flag cover operation?

For now, I am going to sit and watch. I would like to see the full chat transcripts though. Now that would be interesting.

“May you live in interesting times”

Indeed.

K.

SPOOK COUNTRY 2011: HBGary, Palantir, and the CIRC

 

The establishment of a Corporate Information

Reconnaissance Cell (CIRC) will provide Hunton &

Williams LLP with a full spectrum capability set to

collect, analyze, and affect adversarial entities and

networks of interest.

From: Team Themis pdf

CIRC: The New Private Intelligence Wing of (insert company name here)

The HBGary debacle is widening and the players are beginning to jump ship each day. The HBGary mother company is disavowing Aaron Barr and HBGary Federal today via twitter and press releases. However, if you look at the email spool that was leaked, you can see that they could have put a stop to Aaron’s game but failed to put the hammer down. I personally think that they all saw the risk, but they also saw the dollar signs, which in the end won the day.

What Aaron and HBGary/Palantir/Berico were offering was a new kind of intelligence gathering unit or “cell” as they called it in the pdf they shopped to Hunton & Williams LLP. Now, the idea and practice of private intelligence gathering has been around for a very long time, however, the stakes are changing today in the digital world. In the case of Hunton, they were looking for help at the behest of the likes of Bank of America to fight off Wikileaks… And when I say fight them off, it would seem more in the sense of an anything goes just short of “wet works” operations by what I see in the spool which is quite telling.

You see, Wikileaks has made claims that they have a certain 5 gig of data that belonged to a CEO of a bank. Suddenly BofA is all set to have Hunton work with the likes of Aaron Barr on a black project to combat Wikileaks. I guess the cat is out of the bag then isn’t it on just who’s data that is on that alleged hard drive huh? It would seem that someone lost an unencrypted drive or, someone inside the company had had enough and leaked the data to Wikileaks. Will we ever really know I wonder?

Either way, Barr et al, were ready to offer a new offering to Hunton and BofA, an intelligence red cell that could use the best of new technologies against Anonymous and Wikileaks. Now, the document says nothing about Anonymous nor Wikileaks, but the email spool does. This was the intent of the pitch and it was the desire of Hunton and BofA to make both Anonymous and Wikileaks go away, for surely if Wikileaks were attacked Anonymous would be the de facto response would they not?

A long time ago William Gibson predicted this kind of war of attrition online. His dystopian world included private intelligence firms as well as lone hackers out there “DataCowboy’s” running the gamut of corporate intelligence operations to outright theft of Pharma-Kombinat data. It seems that his prescient writings are coming into shape today as a reality in a way. With the advent of what Barr and company wanted to offer, they would be that new “cowboy” or digital Yakuza that would rid clients of pesky digital and real world problems through online investigation and manipulation.

In short, Hunton would have their very own C4I cell within their corporate walls to set against any problem they saw fit. Not only this, but had this sale been a go, then perhaps this would be a standard offering to every other company who could afford it. Can you imagine the bulk of corporations out tehre having their own internal intelligence and dirty tricks wings? Nixon, EH Hunt, and Liddy would all be proud. Though, Nixon and the plumbers would have LOVED to have the technology that Aaron has today, had they had it, they may in fact have been able to pull off that little black bag job on Democratic HQ without ever having to have stepped inside the Watergate

The Technology:

I previously wrote about the technology and methods that Aaron wanted to use/develop and what he was attempting to use on Anonymous as a group as the test case. The technology is based on frequency analysis, link connections, social networking, and a bit of manual investigation. However, it seemed to Aaron, that the bulk of the work would be on the technology side linking people together without really doing the grunt work. The grunt work would be actually conducting analysis of connections and the people who have made them. Their reasons for connections being really left out of the picture as well as the chance that many people within the mass lemming hoards of Anonymous are just click happy clueless folks.

Nor did Aaron take into account the use of the same technologies out there to obfuscate identities and connections by those people who are capable, to completely elude his system altogether. These core people that he was looking to connect together as Anonymous, if indeed he is right, are tech savvy and certainly would take precautions. So, how is it that he thinks he will be able to use macroverse data to define a micro-verse problem? I am steadily coming to the conclusion that perhaps he was not looking to use that data to winnow it down to a few. Instead, through the emails, I believe he was just going to aggregate data from the clueless LOIC users and leverage that by giving the Feds easy pickings to investigate, arrest, and hopefully put the pressure on the core of Anonymous.

There was talk in the emails of using pressure points on people like the financial supporters of Wikileaks. This backs up the statement above because if people are using digital means to support Wikileaks or Anonymous they leave an easy enough trail to follow and aggregate. Those who are friending Facebook support pages for either entity and use real or pseudo real information consistently, you can easily track them. Eventually, you will get their real identities by sifting the data over time using a tool like Palantir, or for that matter Maltego.

The ANONYMOUS names file

This however, does not work on those who are net and security savvy.. AKA hackers. Aaron was too quick to make assumptions that the core of Anonymous weren’t indeed smart enough to cover their tracks and he paid the price as we have seen.

The upshot here and extending what I have said before.. A fool with a tool.. Is still a fool.

What is coming out though more each day, is that not only was Aaron and HBGary Fed offering Palantir, but they were also offering the potential for 0day technologies as a means to gather intelligence from those targets as well as use against them in various ways. This is one of the scarier things to come out of the emails. Here we have a company that is creating 0day for use by intelligence and government that is now potentially offering it to private corporations.

Truly, it’s black Ice… Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of their 0day offerings wasn’t already called that.

The INFOSEC Community, HBGary, and Spook Country:

Since my last post was put on Infosecisland, I had some heated comments from folks who, like those commenting on the Ligattleaks events, have begun moralizing about right and wrong. Their perception is that this whole HBGary is an Infosec community issue, and in reality it isn’t. The Infosec community is just what the shortened name means, (information security) You all in the community are there to protect the data of the client. When you cross the line into intelligence gathering you go from a farily clear black and white, to a world of grays.

HBGary crossed into the gray areas long ago when they started the Fed practice and began working with the likes of the NSA/DOD/CIA etc. What the infosec community has to learn is that now the true nature of cyberwar is not just shutting down the grid and trying to destroy a country, but it also is the “Thousand Grains of Sand” approach to not only spying, but warfare in general. Information is the currency today as it ever was, it just so happens now that it is easier to get that information digitally by hacking into something as opposed to hiring a spy.

So, all of you CISSP’s out there fighting the good fight to make your company actually have policies and procedures, well, you also have to contend with the idea that you are now at war. It’s no longer just about the kiddies taking credit cards. It’s now about the Yakuza, the Russian Mob, and governments looking to steal your data or your access. Welcome to the new world of “spook country”

There is no black and white. There is only gray now.

The Morals:

And so it was, that I was getting lambasted on infosecisland for commenting that I could not really blame Anonymous for their actions completely against HBGary/Aaron. Know what? I still can’t really blame them. As an entity, Anonymous has fought the good fight on many occasions and increasingly they have been a part of the mix where the domino’s are finally falling all over the Middle East presently. Certain factions of the hacker community as well have been assisting when the comms in these countries have been stifled by the local repressive governments and dictators in an effort to control what the outside world see’s as well as its own people inside.

It is my belief that Anonymous does have its bad elements, but, given what I know and what I have seen, so does every group or government. Take a look at our own countries past with regard to the Middle East and the CIA’s machinations there. Instead of fighting for a truly democratic ideal, they have instead sided with the strong man in hopes of someday making that transition to a free society, but in the meantime, we have a malleable player in the region, like Mubarak.

So far, I don’t see Anonymous doing this. So, in my world of gray, until such time as Anonymous does something so unconscionable that it requires their destruction, I say let it ride. For those of your out there saying they are doing it for the power and their own ends, I point you in the direction of our government and say this; “Pot —> Kettle —> Black” Everyone does everything whether it be a single person or a government body out of a desired outcome for themselves. Its a simple fact.

Conlcusion:

We truly live in interesting times as the Chinese would curse us with. Today the technology and the creative ways to use it are outstripping the governments in ability to keep things secret. In the case of Anonymous and HBGary, we have seen just how far the company was willing to go to subvert the laws to effect the ends of their clients. The same can be said about the machinations of the government and the military in their ends. However, one has to look at those ends and the means to get them and judge just was it out of bounds. In the case of the Barr incident, we are seeing that true intelligence techniques of disinformation, psyops, and dirty tricks were on the table for a private company to use against private citizens throughout the globe.

The truth is that this has always been an offering… Just this time the technologies are different and more prevalent.

If you are online, and you do not take precautions to insure your privacy, then you lose. This is even more true today in the US as we see more and more bills and laws allowing the government and police to audit everything you do without the benefit of warrants and or by use of National Security Letters.

The only privacy you truly have, is that which you make for yourself. Keep your wits about you.

K.

HB Gary: Hubris, Bad Science, Poor Operational Methodology, and The HIVE MIND

Algorithms, Social Networks, and COMINT:

When I had heard that HB Gary had been popped and their spool file was on PB I thought that it was unfortunate for them as a fairly well known company. Once the stories started coming out though with the emails being published online, I began to re-think it all. It seems that Aaron Barr really fucked the pooch on this whole thing. He primarily did so due to his own hubris, and for this I cannot fault Anonymous for their actions (within reason) in breaking HB Gary and Barr’s digital spine.

It seems that Barr was labouring not only a flawed theory on tracking social networks, but also in that he planned on selling such a theory and application to the government. One notion was bad, and the other was worse. First off though, lets cover the science shall we? Barr wanted to track users on social networks and show connections that would lead to further data on the users. The extension that he was trying to make was obtaining actual real names, locations and affiliations from disparate sources (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, IRC, etc) While this type of data gathering has been done in the past, it has not usually been culled from multiple sources automatically electronically and then strung together to form a coherent pattern. In short, Barr was wanting to create software/scripts to just scrape content, and then try to connect the dots based on statistics to tie people to an entity like Anonymous. The problem, and what Barr seemed to not comprehend, is that the Internet is a stochastic system, and as such it is impossible to do what he wanted with any kind of accuracy. At least in the way he wanted to do it, you see, it takes some investigation skills to make the connections that a scripted process cannot.

This can be seen directly from the article snippet below where the programmer calls Barr on his flawed logic in what he was doing and wanted to do.

From “How one man tracked down Anonymous and paid a heavy price”

“Danger, Will Robinson!”

Throughout Barr’s research, though, the coder he worked with worried about the relevance of what was being revealed. Barr talked up the superiority of his “analysis” work, but doubts remained. An email exchange between the two on January 19 is instructive:

Barr: [I want to] check a persons friends list against the people that have liked or joined a particular group.

Coder: No it won’t. It will tell you how mindless their friends are at clicking stupid shit that comes up on a friends page. especially when they first join facebook.

Barr: What? Yes it will. I am running throug analysis on the anonymous group right now and it definately would.

Coder: You keep assuming you’re right, and basing that assumption off of guilt by association.

Barr: Noooo….its about probabilty based on frequency…c’mon ur way smarter at math than me.

Coder: Right, which is why i know your numbers are too small to draw the conclusion but you don’t want to accept it. Your probability based on frequency right now is a gut feeling. Gut feelings are usually wrong.

Barr: [redacted]

Coder: [some information redacted] Yeah, your gut feelings are awesome! Plus, scientifically proven that gut feelings are wrong by real scientist types.

Barr: [some information redacted] On the gut feeling thing…dude I don’t just go by gut feeling…I spend hours doing analysis and come to conclusions that I know can be automated…so put the taco down and get to work!

Coder: I’m not doubting that you’re doing analysis. I’m doubting that statistically that analysis has any mathematical weight to back it. I put it at less than .1% chance that it’s right. You’re still working off of the idea that the data is accurate. mmmm…..taco!

Aaron, I have news for you, the coder was right! Let the man eat his taco in peace! For God’s sake you were hanging your hat completely on scrape data from disparate social networks to tie people together within a deliberately anonymous body of individuals! Of course one could say that this is not an impossible feat, but, one would also say that it would take much more than just gathering statistical data of logins and postings, it would take some contextual investigation too. This was something Barr was not carrying out.

I actually know something about this type of activity as you all may know. I do perform scraping, but, without real context to understand the data (i.e. understanding the users, their goals, their MO, etc) then you really have no basis to predict what they are going to do or really their true affiliations. In the case of jihadi’s they often are congregating on php boards, so you can easily gather their patterns of friendship or communications just by the postings alone. Now, trying to tie these together with posts on other boards, unless the users use the same nick or email address, is nearly impossible.

Just how Aaron Barr was proposing to do this and get real usable data is beyond comprehension. It was thus that the data he did produce, and then leak to the press enraged Anonymous, who then hacked HB Gary and leaked the data in full claiming that none of the data was correct. Either way, Aaron got his clock cleaned not only from the hack (which now claims to have been partially a social engineering attack on the company) but also from the perspective of his faulty methodologies to harvest this data being published to the world by Anonymous.

OSINT, Counter-Intelligence, and Social Engineering:

The real ways to gather the intelligence on people like Anonymous’ core group is to infiltrate them. Aaron tried this at first, but failed to actually be convincing at it. The Anon’s caught on quickly to him and outed him with relish, they in fact used this as an advantage, spurring on their own efforts to engineer the hack on HB Gary. Without the right kind of mindset or training, one cannot easily insert themselves in a group like this and successfully pull of the role of mole or double agent.

In the case of Anonymous though, it is not impossible to pull this off. It would take time and patience. Patience it seems that Aaron Barr lacked as much as he did on scientific and mathematical method where this whole expedition was concerned. Where his method could have been successful would have only come from the insertion of an agent provocateur into the core group to gather intel and report back those connections. Without that, the process which Aaron was trying would have yielded some data, but to sift through it all with interviews by the FBI and other agencies would have become ponderous and useless in the end.

It is my belief that there is a core group of Anon’s as I have said before. Simply from a C&C structure, there has to be an operational core in order for there to be cohesion. This can be seen in any hive structure like bees, there are drones, and there is a queen. A simple infrastructure that works efficiently, and in the case of anon, I believe it is much the same. So, were one looking to infiltrate this core, they would have a bit of a time doing so, but, it could be done. Take out the core, and you take out the operational ability of the unit as a whole to be completely effective. To do this though, one should be able to understand and apply the precepts of counter intelligence warfare, something Barr failed to grasp.

In the end.. It bit him pretty hard in the ass because he was in a hurry to go to press and to sell the ideas to the military industrial complex. Funny though, the real boys and girls of the spook world would have likely told him the same thing I am saying here… No sale.

Oh well… Arron Icarus Barr flew too close to the anonymous sun on wings made from faulty mathematical designs and burned up on re-entry.

K.

5 Reasons to Doubt Al-Qaeda Magazine’s Authenticity: Gives One Ideas, False Flag Anyone?

The 5 reasons:

(1) Bin Laden and Zawahiri are extremely secretive and issue statements rarely and directly to the media. It would be unusual for them to write for a third-party publication, especially one put out by the Yemen-based AQAP, with which they have little or no direct ties. However, it is possible that the magazine’s producers simply copied old statements they had made.

(2) The language of the magazine, such as “Make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom,” reflects either a poor command of English or a light-hearted sense of self-parody. AQAP is not known for either. Awlaki, whose location in Yemen makes his participation very plausible, is a native, fluent, and very articulate English speaker. His fiery English-language sermons are not funny.

(3) The magazine includes an essay by Abu Mu’sab al-Suri. But Suri, whose connection to al-Qaeda is uncertain, has been locked up in Guantanamo–and possibly a CIA black site–since 2005. However, as with bin Laden, it is possible the magazine simply copied old statements.

(4) Analysts tell me that the magazine PDF file either does not load properly or carries a trojan virus. This is unusual because al-Qaeda and AQAP have produced and disseminated such PDF publications many times without such problems. If the report was produced by U.S. counterintelligence, or if the U.S. operatives attached the virus to the original file, would the trojan really be so easily detectable by simple, consumer-grade virus scanners? Surely U.S. counterintelligence has less detectable viruses at their disposal.

(5) The web-based “jihadi” community itself seems suspicious. The report has received little attention on web forums, especially given its apparent importance. A publication including such high-profile figures would normally receive far more attention than it has so far.

Full article HERE Inspire AQAP Glossy HERE (CLEAN)

Exploit or Ineptitude?

When this file came out I too had some issues with it not downloading fully from the myriad of uploader sites that the Jihadi’s had “ostensibly” uploaded it to. I attributed it to a lack of understanding on their part that the original had been corrupt somewhere along the line between sharing partners and propagated that way. However, given all of the data post release and some looking into, I think there are a couple of scenarios that might fit the bill;

1) The original was sent out to the trusted before going wide. Once sent wide, it was quickly infected with malware per persons unknown and propagated further on the internet.

2) The reason for the placement of the malware could be to sow distrust on the part of the jihadi’s trafficking in the data by persons unknown. This makes it an untrusted channel and more likely people will not download it too quickly in the future. I say this because the malware was easily detectable by current AV products. Had this been a program of the intelligence agencies, they would have indeed used 0day that was not detectable. The same could be said for certain factions of the hacking community who may have an interest in helping the other “community”

3) This was indeed some sort of poorly conceived exploit by some organization as the malware was easily detectable.. They screwed up.

I cannot say either way and I as yet, have not seen a copy of the “infected” file to prove out that it did indeed have malware embedded in it. The current version that I have on my server (linked above) is clean, but I believe that I have another dirty copy on another *nix box. I will check that later and amend this post once I have. All of this though does not lead me to believe that the magazine was part and parcel created by anyone else but a jihadist movement faction that offered it to AQAP.

You can go on the cues from above about the language and the other telltale clues that this is not a straight out work of GIMF or As Sahab. The writer of the article is right on this account in that the language would have been much better constructed by bi-lingual speakers of Arabic and English as you have seen in the past. The Al-Awlaki connection too may be there, but he likely did not have oversight directly of this magazine. In fact, when I pulled the metadata on the PDF file that I got hold of today, there was NONE in it. So it is hard to say who made the file at present. I will check again once I find that dirty copy I downloaded when it came out for metadata in situ.

As for Giving One Ideas..

All of this has given me ideas on perhaps how the information war should be waged against AQ and other online Jihadist movements if it already isn’t being done by the likes of the NSA. What if such PDF files were commonly compromised with 0day? The jihadists usually traffic pretty much only in PDF files nowadays. If you go to their sites you can’t even get a lock on the files there because they have uploaded them all to share sites all over the globe. So, who’s to say that there isn’t some governmental bodies out there with access to those .com .net sites and are infecting the files soon after the uploads happen?

I’d be doing that…

Hell, I’d be loading the files with malware for all the major OS’ out there not just Windows variants… Which, we know a good percentage of these online jihadi’s are using Windows as you may have seen in the posts I have made. The only problem then would be that if you are doing this to the downloaders, it leaves the creators still potentially unaffected.. How to get the creators boxes I wonder….

I guess the question Is… is this already being done? If not.. Why not? Seems to me that we could get a pretty nice haul if you compromised all those down loaders boxes and set up a nice back channel server somewhere to aggregate all the data as well as do some escalation….

Maybe the government just needs a good copy of Core Impact huh?

CoB

FOCA: A New Recon Tool

I recently got a text from a former co-worker saying that I should take a look at FOCA, a tool that I had not heard of before. The text said that this tool had a good deal of forensics potential in that it would search a group of documents and extract the metadata from them. My friend got it half right from what I have experienced so far.

The tool does indeed cull metadata, but, it is from directed web searches with engines like Google and Bing that it does so. This however is a fantastic thing! Even if you cannot just point it at a directory on a hard drive locally, this tool is a great resource for OSINT/RECON online. I decided to give it a try first on some Jihadist sites *post to follow* but then decided to use it against a “known domain” NYSE.com

The tool gives you a simple front end that allows you to search a domain/website and saves the whole process in a proprietary project based format. So, you can go looking for a specific domain and create a whole project to save all the collected data. The only flaw I have seen so far is that this tool does not output your search/project into any kind of use able report format.

The tool goes out to Google, begins searching for numerous filetypes such as .doc or .pdf. Once located, the URL’s show up in the tools window to show you if you do indeed have good hits. After the initial search, you can then download all of the documents for the next step of pulling the metadata. This is where it gets interesting…

Once the docs are downloaded, you can analyze the metadata and then FOCA gives you a series of pull downs that show you all of the user data that the docs offer up… And boy can it provide a plethora of data! From the NYSE searches I was able to not only see the user names, email addresses, software being used to create the documents, but also folders that they were stored in!

Then you can move on to more obscure searches using the metadata. FOCA has a feature to search those same engines that it just pulled the files from to go further and look into the domain structures, server names, users, printers, suffice to say it pretty much will map out a whole infrastructure for you using Google/Bing and the metadata you already have.

Now, depending on the security levels that the systems being searched against have, it is possible to cull quite a bit of intel on your target. So much data that in fact one could make a real network map as well as a full plan of attack on users, networks, file systems, etc.

It’s kinda scary really as you may be able to see from the pictures here….

All in all, this tool is quite the find. I would only like to ask the creator to allow for a local feature to just access metadata for files that have been downloaded already… But that’s for another post to follow on those whacky jihadist sites…

FOCA

CoB