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How a Few Yellow Dots Burned the Intercept's NSA Leaker (arstechnica.com)
On Monday, news outlet The Intercept released documents on election tampering from an NSA leaker. The documents revealed that a Russian intelligence operation sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials days before the election, which ran through a hack of a U.S. voting software supplier. Hours later, the Department of Justice charged 25-year-old government contractor Reality Leigh Winner with sharing top secret material with the media. The DoJ said it Winner had "printed and improperly removed classified intelligence reporting, which contained classified national defense information" before mailing the materials. But how could the DoJ know that it was Winner who had printed the documents, or that the documents were printed at all? ArsTechnica explains: [...] The Intercept team inadvertently exposed its source because the copy showed fold marks that indicated it had been printed -- and it included encoded watermarking that revealed exactly when it had been printed and on what printer. The watermarks in the scanned document The Intercept published yesterday -- were from a Xerox Docucolor printer. Many printers use this or similar schemes, printing faint yellow dots in a grid pattern on printed documents as a form of steganography, encoding metadata about the document into its hard-copy output. Researchers working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation have reverse-engineered the grid pattern employed by this class of printer; using the tool, Ars (and others, including security researcher Robert Graham) determined that the document passed to The Intercept was printed on May 9, 2017 at 6:20am from a printer with the serial number 535218 or 29535218. Further reading: How The Intercept Outed Reality Winner.
If you're going to leak documents, take a photo and crank up the jpeg compression level to help hide the watermarks.
As a non-native english speaker, I ask: is this an actual, socially acceptable name in english-speaking countries? "Reality Winner", just like somebody who won a reality show?!
While not everybody knows about the yellow dots, almost everybody involved with infosec does. How can The Intercept can be trusted to hold or publish any leakers' information securely?
Was this one reporter who screwed up? Didn't he have a second person reviewing his work? Isn't there a team of people at The Intercept who discuss whistleblowing publications? Isn't anybody on such a team aware of digital privacy issues?
This will be a huge loss if The Intercept becomes useless as it was basically founded to handle stories like this. But given that, how could the outcome have been so bad in this case?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
While interesting, and certainly providing confirmation, this wasn't the primary mechanism that was used to track her down according to the affidaivat. Before even IDing a specific printer, they simply looked for someone that had printed it out, period.
Internal auditing showed that only six employees had printed out the item in question. A search of the six computers showed that she had emailed The Intercept from her work computer (and that no one else had). Coded metadata just backs it up, but it's dumber than that.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
"The U.S. Government Agency determined that six individuals printed this reporting. WINNER was one of these six individuals. A further audit of the six individuals' desk computers revealed that WINNER had e-mail contact with the News Outlet. The audit did not reveal that any of the other individuals had e-mail contact with the News Outlet."
Also, don't use your work computer or email account to send/receive emails to the organization you're leaking classified documents to.
Sadly, she is being charged under the Espionage Act. There is no defense, no mitigating circumstances, and she will spend many long years in prison as an example. Even if you disagree with her actions , this sounds inappropriate. Like the Soviet Union or China.
Then again, they also (reportedly) gave away her location (Augusta GA) to the government person they were trying to verify the documents with.
Wait, they have top secret government documents, and they're going to verify them with the government? And then give information of their source to the government? And then release the original photos of documents to the public? Did they also hand over the originals to the government so they could grab fingerprints and other forensic evidence off of them?
There is no excuse for how many failures the Intercept committed in protecting a formerly anonymous source. I'm going out on a limb here and say that this will be the last time they receive info from an actual anonymous source that isn't a complete idiot. Then again, as noted, Winner appears to qualify as a complete idiot, emailing them from work in the first place.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
> and picked a more socially acceptable name
Her birth name is Sara, not "Reality". She chose to be Reality Winner instead of the normal name her parents had chosen.