*I stand ready to start a Beyond the Beyond venture-spook category if I get enough of this stuff. It doesn't seem to be slowing down much.
*Although these Russians were in America under deep cover, they don't seem to have much interest in the secrets of the American government. Probably because nobody does.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19131-innovation-the-tech-refresher-russias-spies-needed.html
(...)
The FBI can testify to that fact – it found 100 pictures with readable text in them. The bureau says the suspects secreted encrypted text data in images using customised steganography software believed to have been developed by the SVR, Russia's foreign intelligence service.
That choice – not using a commercial or freeware package – was probably a security measure, but it was undone when the instructions for opening the program ("press ctrl, alt and e") and the 27-character password it required were left on a notepad in a suspect's New Jersey home.
Mazurczyk says that smarter spies would move to a very hard-to-detect technology called "network steganography" – a variety of methods to sneak extra information into streams of internet phone calls or undefined internet traffic.
"These methods transfer a dummy file and simultaneously send secret data. So if no one caches your VOIP or network traffic the trail is gone," he says. "If these Russian spies had used modern network steganographic methods they most likely would never have been caught," he says.
Broadcasting secrets
Still more astonishing, perhaps, was the way one suspect regularly communicated from her laptop in a café or book shop with a known Russian embassy official via a contact's laptop in a minivan out in the street. On 10 Wednesdays between January and June this year, the FBI was able to sniff and detect the hard-wired MAC addresses of each person's laptop as they used a customised wireless file-transfer package.
Normally, MAC addresses identify a computer to, for instance, a Wi-Fi router, allowing the router to decide if it should allow the computer to access the internet. What is surprising is that the alleged spies did not think to regularly change their laptop MAC addresses to obfuscate any surveillance operation. This is easily performed using a small piece of software called a MAC spoofing utility, which is available online or could easily have been written into the laptop comms package by the SVR.
Instead, the FBI now has a complete record of the unchanged MAC addresses communicating on multiple occasions.
"I guess they got a bit arrogant and just didn't bother to look for surveillance," says Tony Sale, a former wireless technology expert for MI5 – officially known as the Security Service – the agency charged with protecting the UK against terrorists and spies.
Empty the bin
In another arena, the FBI's suspects displayed blind faith in a computer's apparent ability to delete data. It doesn't work like that: "deleting" a file merely removes the filename header, leaving the data intact on the hard drive until it is overwritten. So when the home of a Boston suspect was searched by the FBI, multiple deleted messages, thought to have been due for transmission by steganography, were found and recovered from hard drives. Use of any commonly available data overwriting utility could have kept that evidence hidden.
Of course, spies don't always need new tech. A search of the house of one of the alleged spy cells in Yonkers, New York, revealed an old-fashioned shortwave radio which the FBI thinks had been used to receive encrypted Morse-code signals from Moscow. Unfortunately for the Russians, however, the suspects failed to conceal their decryption codebooks.
Shortwave was not a bad idea, though. "Using shortwave Morse is fairly good cover," says Sale, who monitored Russian spies in the UK communicating with Moscow in the 1960s. "There probably aren't all that many intercept stations listening for Morse traffic any more." (((Dead Media, your future key to uncrackable communications.)))
(((They're being charged with "conspiracy to act as unregistered agents of a foreign government," which is pretty nebulous, and with money laundering, which isn't all that nebulous. They're money launderers, I reckon. Money launderers whose handlers are spies. Welcome to the 21st century.)))
(((This would explain why the US State Department isn't making much of a fuss about the situation. These people were in the US to pump Russian black money into the US.)))
(((This just in: yeah, you tell 'em, Svetlana.)))
http://rbth.ru/articles/2010/07/06/anna_chapman_the_girl_every_man_wants.html
