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Iranians Compromised a Highly Sensitive CIA Covert Communications System in 2011 by Using Google Search: Report (yahoo.com)
In 2011, Iran was able to use Google's search functionality to hack into a secret CIA communication network that was being used to contact agents and informants around the world -- a breach that appears to have triggered the exposure and execution of Agency sources in China and Iran, Yahoo News reported Friday.
In 2013, hundreds of CIA officers â" many working nonstop for weeks â" scrambled to contain a disaster of global proportions: a compromise of the agencyâ(TM)s internet-based covert communications system used to interact with its informants in dark corners around the world. Teams of CIA experts worked feverishly to take down and reconfigure the websites secretly used for these communications; others managed operations to quickly spirit assets to safety and oversaw other forms of triage.
âoeWhen this was going on, it was all that mattered,â said one former intelligence community official. The situation was âoecatastrophic,â said another former senior intelligence official.
From around 2009 to 2013, the U.S. intelligence community experienced crippling intelligence failures related to the secret internet-based communications system, a key means for remote messaging between CIA officers and their sources on the ground worldwide. The previously unreported global problem originated in Iran and spiderwebbed to other countries, and was left unrepaired â" despite warnings about what was happening â" until more than two dozen sources died in China in 2011 and 2012 as a result, according to 11 former intelligence and national security officials.
The disaster ensnared every corner of the national security bureaucracy â" from multiple intelligence agencies, congressional intelligence committees and independent contractors to internal government watchdogs â" forcing a slow-moving, complex government machine to grapple with the deadly dangers of emerging technologies.
In a world where dependence on advanced technology may be a necessary evil for modern espionage, particularly in hostile regions where American officials canâ(TM)t operate freely, such technical failures are an ever present danger and will only become more acute with time.
âoeWhen these types of compromises happen, itâ(TM)s so dark and bad,â said one former official. âoeThey can burrow in. It never really ends.â
A former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the compromise said it had global implications for the CIA. âoeYou start thinking twice about people, from China to Russia to Iran to North Korea,â said the former official. The CIA was worried about its network âoetotally unwinding worldwide.â
Yahoo Newsâ(TM) reporting on this global communications failure is based on conversations with eleven former U.S. intelligence and government officials directly familiar with the matter who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive operations. Multiple former intelligence officials said that the damage from the potential global compromise was serious â" even catastrophic â" and will persist for years.
More than just a question of a single failure, the fiasco illustrates a breakdown that was never properly addressed. The governmentâ(TM)s inability to address the communication systemâ(TM)s insecurities until after sources were rolled up in China was disastrous. âoeWeâ(TM)re still dealing with the fallout,â said one former national security official. âoeDozens of people around the world were killed because of this.â
***** EAT AT JOE'S
One of the largest intelligence failures of the past decade started in Iran in 2009, when the Obama administration announced the discovery of a secret Iranian underground enrichment facility â" part of Iranâ(TM)s headlong drive for nuclear weapons. Angered about the breach, the Iranians went on a mole hunt, looking for foreign spies, said one former senior intelligence official.
The mole hunt wasnâ(TM)t hard, in large part, because the communications system the CIA was using to communicate with agents was flawed. Former U.S. officials said the internet-based platform, which was first used in war zones in the Middle East, was not built to withstand the sophisticated counterintelligence efforts of a s
Seems insecure.
Maybe we should go back to typewriters.
If you consider USA evil — more evil than Iran and China — then you are in a wrong place. Learn Chinese and Farsi and fuck off to that part of the world, both physical and virtual...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Google didn't do anything but index web pages. The CIA controllers who didn't take the extremely simple and well-known measures to prevent indexing are the ones who were evil.
It's like saying car manufacturers are evil because someone used their product to rob a bank. Only the bank opened up the vault as a drive-through instead of actually securing it in any way.
TL;DR the CIA and Iran/China used convenient tools on the internet for spycraft. The CIA didn't use it prudently however, and got agents and informants killed due to their carelessness.
Most of the methods Iranians used would have been familiar to George Smiley. They looked at what the Americans obviously knew about Iran and figured out who could have told them. Then they leaned on those people and found out how they were communicating with the CIA.
This is where Google came in. These people were using phony websites to communicate with the CIA, and Iranian intelligence used Google to uncover similar websites. Then they hacked into those websites after which they had the keys to the kingdom.
It was the CIA's reliance on a bodged-together, vulnerable system that killed those assets. They used it even after they'd been warned by their own analysts in 2008 that it had been compromised.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There was still some old fashioned spying going on. Without a double agent to show the Iranians a sample website, they never would have figured out which strings to search for.
The bigger question is, did Iran share this information with China and Russia? If so, what did they get in exchange?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
the compromised communications system tried to work by "security through obscurity"-- it used publicly-visible websites that were indexable and searchable, and didn't realize that once one was compromised, you could look at what was on it, and use well-crafted search terms to find them all.
And neither the first nor last example.
The future of real warfare between states isn't limited to military force. It's likely that any military actions will be preparatory and sustaining, but not decisive. Attacks on infrastructure, denial of access to critical information and resources, and isolation from allies can all be accomplished with information technology.
This example is most instructive in that it shows how states with limited resources in some areas can be capable, even formidable adversaries in others. The US has the most capable military assets available, with only a few (but notable) exceptions where adversaries have sufficient assets to cause major losses to US forces and potentially prevail in regional conflicts. But in so-called 'cyber' warfare, the US has no discernible advantage. Relatively small, impoverished, or militarily weak states have equal capabilities. And non-state players can be just as capable.
For the US, the only real hope is that it has undisclosed capabilities, which is entirely likely, or that it will focus on developing those. Sadly, unlike military force, which takes in some instances a generation to develop new and overwhelming advantages, cyber warfare changes year,y, actually, monthly, and these advances are shared virtually instantly among allies, requiring no factories, manufacturing techniques, or natural resources beyond manpower, intellect, and thought. Ask aerospace engineers - it takes so much less time to devise a new weapon system than it does to actually manufacture and refine it to the point of usefulness. And cyber warfare is cheaper too, by every measure, to develop and deploy.
I'm confident in assuming that the US and others have the means to detect and monitor electronic communications among allies and adversaries worldwide, with few exceptions. And they constantly have to refine those methods to keep up with the changing landscape. And the only way to do that is to deploy an intercept system that captures everything, everywhere, all the time, and keeps it for analysis and exploitation. All this means our government is compelled to violate our privacy and civil rights, if not explicitly, then implicitly, as it captures all the things always, just to be able to find the enemy's vulnerabilities and secrets.
It's a nasty business. We have no other choice. Our enemies will certainly do so, and without a shred of restraint. If they can prevail at our expense, they will indeed. And this example shows that there is no hope of ever turning back from this state. It will only get worse. All attempts to secure our information systems will only succeed in making it more difficult to find the enemy. They will use all security measures to improve their methods. But we must improve security, no matter, for all the other reasons. A vicious circle, one impossible to stop.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
That was actually in the news three years ago, but because of secrecy, the details of exactly what he warned about was left out. Now we know: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/ne... or https://www.thestate.com/news/...
"The CIA case involves former contractor John Reidy, who asserts he was punished after warning of a “catastrophic failure” in the spy agency’s operations. “It was a recipe for disaster,” Reidy wrote in his appeal, which was redacted by intelligence officials. “We had a catastrophic failure on our hands that would ensnare a great many of our sources.” His lawyer, Kel McClanahan, said Reidy was in charge of identifying foreign sources and systems in the telecommunications and computer fields that would be of interest to U.S. intelligence agencies.
Reidy also was responsible for developing intelligence operations against those targets, his lawyer said. McClanahan said his client is not permitted to discuss the case in more detail even with him because the CIA says the information is classified.
Reidy asserts that he first detected vulnerabilities in a CIA program in 2006, according to the appeal filing obtained by McClatchy. Signs of the problems included “anomalies in our operations and conflicting intelligence reporting that indicated several of our operations had been compromised,” he wrote, adding that he noticed “sources abruptly and without reason ceasing all communications with us.”
Why don't they just use public pages? The internet has no shortage of discussion forums, many of which must be frequented by millions of people, even in Iran and China.
MMOs. MMOs make the perfect medium for covert communication. Think about how many hundreds, if not thousands of games there are that allow communication between players, many with world-wide player bases. You have behemoths like WoW with multiple servers in multiple regions down to $2 cellphone games. Even if a country were able to go through the arduous task of figuring if or what game is being used, simple tradecraft basics make monitoring difficult. It could be coded messages, set times to meet, or even something as simple as sending/giving a player a certain item or buying/selling an item at a certain price had different or predetermined meanings. Unless a target is already under surveillance and their machine is compromised an agency would have to covertly find/add a back door or crack and track every game available (and with VPNs and other methods even games NOT available) within it's borders.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Come on, Google as a tool was about as important as they fact that they used the internet developed by US own DARPA. Oh, and they likely used Intel or AMD CPUs, and probably US made Windows or Linux, paired Chrome or Edge or Firefox too.Or maybe they used an iPad, so let's change the headline to using Apple.
The article makes it sounds like Google was the weakness here. If it wasn't for Google search, they would have used other tools with the same result. While interesting news, the headline on Slashdot is just sensationalism - notice the linked article does not have Google in the headline, or any other splashy company names.