FOGINT: Big Takedown Coincident with Durov Detainment. Coincidence?
December 19, 2024
This blog post is the work of an authentic dinobaby. No smart software was used.
In recent years, global authorities have taken down several encrypted communication channels. Exclu and Ghost, for example. Will a more fragmented approach keep the authorities away? Apparently not. A Europol press release announces, “International Operation Takes Down Another Encrypted Messaging Service Used by Criminals.” The write-up notes:
“Criminals, in response to the disruptions of their messaging services, have been turning to a variety of less-established or custom-built communication tools that offer varying degrees of security and anonymity. While the new fragmented landscape poses challenges for law enforcement, the takedown of established communication channels shows that authorities are on top of the latest technologies that criminals use.”
Case in point: After a three-year investigation, a multi-national law enforcement team just took down MATRIX. The service, “by criminals for criminals,” was discovered in 2021 on a convicted murderer’s phone. It was a sophisticated tool bad actors must be sad to lose. We learn:
“It was soon clear that the infrastructure of this platform was technically more complex than previous platforms such as Sky ECC and EncroChat. The founders were convinced that the service was superior and more secure than previous applications used by criminals. Users were only able to join the service if they received an invitation. The infrastructure to run MATRIX consisted of more than 40 servers in several countries with important servers found in France and Germany. Cooperation between the Dutch and French authorities started through a JIT set up at Eurojust. By using innovative technology, the authorities were able to intercept the messaging service and monitor the activity on the service for three months. More than 2.3 million messages in 33 languages were intercepted and deciphered during the investigation. The messages that were intercepted are linked to serious crimes such as international drug trafficking, arms trafficking, and money laundering. Actions to take down the service and pursue serious criminals happened on 3 December in four countries.”
Those four countries are France, Spain, Lithuania, and Germany, with an assist by the Netherlands. Interpol highlights the importance of international cooperation in fighting organized crime. Is this the key to pulling ahead in the encryption arms race?
Cynthia Murrell, December 19, 2024
FOGINT: Telegram Steps Up Its Cooperation with Law Enforcement
December 12, 2024
This short item is the work of the dinobaby. The “fog” is from Gifr.com.
Engadget, an online news service, reported “Telegram Finally Takes Action to Remove CSAM from Its Platform.” France picks up Telegram founder Pavel Durov and explains via his attorney how the prison system works in the country. Mr. Durov, not yet in prison, posted an alleged Euro 5 million with the understanding he could not leave the country. According to Engadget, Mr. Durov is further modifying his attitude toward “free speech” and “freedom.”
The article states:
Telegram is taking a significant step to reduce child sexual abuse material (CSAM), partnering with the International Watch Foundation (IWF) four months after the former’s founder and CEO Pavel Durov was arrested. The French authorities issued 12 charges against Durov in August, including complicity in “distributing, offering or making available pornographic images of minors, in an organized group” and “possessing pornographic images of minors.”
For those not familiar with the International Watch Foundation, the organization serves as a “hub” for law enforcement and companies acting as intermediaries for those engaged in buying, leasing, selling, or exchanging illicit images or videos of children. Since 2013, Telegram has mostly been obstinate when asked to cooperate with investigators. The company has waved its hands and insisted that it is not into curtailing free speech.
After the French snagged Mr. Durov, he showed a sudden interest in cooperating with authorities. The Engadget report says:
Telegram has taken other steps since Durov’s arrest, announcing in September that it would hand over IP addresses and phone numbers in legal requests — something it fought in the past. Durov must remain in France for the foreseeable future.
What’s Telegram going to do after releasing handles, phone numbers, and possibly some of that log data allegedly held in servers available to the company? The answer is, “Telegram is pursuing its next big thing.” Engadget does not ask, “What’s Telegram’s next act?” Surprisingly a preview of Telegram’s future is unfolding in TON Foundation training sessions in Vancouver, Istanbul, and numerous other locations.
But taking that “real” work next step is not in the cards for most Telegram watchers. The “finally” is simply bringing down the curtain of Telegram’s first act. More acts are already on stage.
Stephen E Arnold, December 12, 2024
Dark Web: Clever and Cute Security Innovations
December 11, 2024
This write up was created by an actual 80-year-old dinobaby. If there is art, assume that smart software was involved. Just a tip.
I am not sure how the essay / technical analysis “The Fascinating Security Model of Dark Web Marketplaces” will diffuse within the cyber security community. I want to highlight what strikes me as a useful analysis and provide a brief, high-level summary of the points which my team and I found interesting. We have not focused on the Dark Web since we published Dark Web Notebook, a complement to my law enforcement training sessions about the Dark Web in the period from 2013 to 2016.
This write up does a good job of explaining use of open source privacy tools like Pretty Good Privacy and its two-factor authentication. The write up walks through a “no JavaScript” approach to functions on the Dark Web site. The references to dynamic domain name operations is helpful as well.
The first observation I would offer is that in the case of the Dark Web site analyzed in the cited article is that the security mechanisms in use have matured and, in the opinion of my research team, advanced to thwart some of the techniques used to track and take down the type of sites hosted by Cyberbunker in Germany. This is — alas — inevitable, and it makes the job of investigators more difficult.
The second observation is that this particular site makes use of distributed services. With the advent of certain hosting providers to offer self managed virtual servers and a professed inability to know what’s happening on physical machines. Certain hosting providers “comply” and then say, “If you try to access the virtual machines, they can fail. Since we don’t manage them, you guys will have to figure out how to get them back up.” Cute and effective.
The third observation is that the hoops through which a potential drug customer has to get through are likely to make a person with an addled brain get clean and then come back and try again. On the other hand, the Captcha might baffle a sober user or investigator as well. Cute and annoying.
The essay is useful and worth reading because it underscores the value of fluid online infrastructures for bad actors.
Stephen E Arnold, December 11, 2024
Explaining Graykey: Helpful or Harmful for Law Enforcement?
November 25, 2024
I am not keen on making some “secrets” publicly available. Those keen on channeling Edward Snowden may have glory words to describe their activities. I take a different view: Some types of information should be proprietary and made known only to those engaged in trying to enforce applicable laws. That said, I want to point to a Reddit.com post about “privacy.” The trigger for the post is an article behind a paywall about a device used to extract information from a mobile phone.
The Reddit post provides a link to the source document “Leaked Documents Show What Phones Secretive Tech ‘Graykey’ Can Unlock”. That write up is typical of non-LE and intel professional reactions to certain types of specialized software and hardware.
What I want to mention is that the Reddit post provides some supplementary information which is not widely known and generally not bandied about outside of certain professional groups. You can find this post, the links to the additional information, and some commentary to disambiguate the jargon used to keep chatter about specialized products and services within a “community.” Here’s the link to the Reddit information: https://shorturl.at/KsDwc
To be frank, I miss the good old days when information of a sensitive nature did not become course material for a computer science and programming class or a road map for outfits competing with US firms. But I am a dinobaby. Believe me, no one cares about my old-timey thoughts.
Stephen E Arnold, November 25, 2024
Entity Extraction: Not As Simple As Some Vendors Say
November 19, 2024
No smart software. Just a dumb dinobaby. Oh, the art? Yeah, MidJourney.
Most of the systems incorporating entity extraction have been trained to recognize the names of simple entities and mostly based on the use of capitalization. An “entity” can be a person’s name, the name of an organization, or a location like Niagara Falls, near Buffalo, New York. The river “Niagara” when bound to “Falls” means a geologic feature. The “Buffalo” is not a Bubalina; it is a delightful city with even more pleasing weather.
The same entity extraction process has to work for specialized software used by law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and legal professionals. Compared to entity extraction for consumer-facing applications like Google’s Web search or Apple Maps, the specialized software vendors have to contend with:
- Gang slang in English and other languages; for example, “bumble bee.” This is not an insect; it is a nickname for the Latin Kings.
- Organizations operating in Lao PDR and converted to English words like Zhao Wei’s Kings Romans Casino. Mr. Wei has been allegedly involved in gambling activities in a poorly-regulated region in the Golden Triangle.
- Individuals who use aliases like maestrolive, james44123, or ahmed2004. There are either “real” people behind the handles or they are sock puppets (fake identities).
Why do these variations create a challenge? In order to locate a business, the content processing system has to identify the entity the user seeks. For an investigator, chopping through a thicket of language and idiosyncratic personas is the difference between making progress or hitting a dead end. Automated entity extraction systems can work using smart software, carefully-crafted and constantly updated controlled vocabulary list, or a hybrid system.
Automated entity extraction systems can work using smart software, carefully-crafted and constantly updated controlled vocabulary list, or a hybrid system.
Let’s take an example which confronts a person looking for information about the Ku Group. This is a financial services firm responsible for the Kucoin. The Ku Group is interesting because it has been found guilty in the US for certain financial activities in the State of New York and by the US Securities & Exchange Commission.
Pavel Durov and Telegram: In the Spotlight Again
October 21, 2024
No smart software used for the write up. The art, however, is a different story.
Several news sources reported that the entrepreneurial Pavel Durov, the found of Telegram, has found a way to grab headlines. Mr. Durov has been enjoying a respite in France, allegedly due to his contravention of what the French authorities views as a failure to cooperate with law enforcement. After his detainment, Mr. Durov signaled that he has cooperated and would continue to cooperate with investigators in certain matters.
A person under close scrutiny may find that the experience can be unnerving. The French are excellent intelligence operators. I wonder how Mr. Durov would hold up under the ministrations of Israeli and US investigators. Thanks, ChatGPT, you produced a usable cartoon with only one annoying suggestion unrelated to my prompt. Good enough.
Mr. Durov may have an opportunity to demonstrate his willingness to assist authorities in their investigation into documents published on the Telegram Messenger service. These documents, according to such sources as Business Insider and South China Morning Post, among others, report that the Telegram channel Middle East Spectator dumped information about Israel’s alleged plans to respond to Iran’s October 1, 2024, missile attack.
The South China Morning Post reported:
The channel for the Middle East Spectator, which describes itself as an “open-source news aggregator” independent of any government, said in a statement that it had “received, through an anonymous source on Telegram who refused to identify himself, two highly classified US intelligence documents, regarding preparations by the Zionist regime for an attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran”. The Middle East Spectator said in its posted statement that it could not verify the authenticity of the documents.
Let’s look outside this particular document issue. Telegram’s mostly moderation-free approach to the content posted, distributed, and pushed via the Telegram platform is like to come under more scrutiny. Some investigators in North America view Mr. Durov’s system as a less pressing issue than the content on other social media and messaging services.
This document matter may bring increased attention to Mr. Durov, his brother (allegedly with the intelligence of two PhDs), the 60 to 80 engineers maintaining the platform, and its burgeoning ancillary interests in crypto. Mr. Durov has some fancy dancing to do. One he is able to travel, he may find that additional actions will be considered to trim the wings of the Open Network Foundation, the newish TON Social service, and the “almost anything” goes approach to the content generated and disseminated by Telegram’s almost one billion users.
From a practical point of view, a failure to exercise judgment about what is allowed on Messenger may derail Telegram’s attempts to become more of a mover and shaker in the world of crypto currency. French actions toward Mr. Pavel should have alerted the wizardly innovator that governments can and will take action to protect their interests.
Now Mr. Durov is placing himself, his colleagues, and his platform under more scrutiny. Close scrutiny may reveal nothing out of the ordinary. On the other hand, when one pays close attention to a person or an organization, new and interesting facts may be identified. What happens then? Often something surprising.
Will Mr. Durov get that message?
Stephen E Arnold, October 21, 2024
Surveillance Watch Maps the Surveillance App Ecosystem
October 1, 2024
Here is an interesting resource: Surveillance Watch compiles information about surveillance tech firms, organizations that fund them, and the regions in which they are said to operate. The lists, compiled from contributions by visitors to the site, are not comprehensive. But they are full of useful information. The About page states:
“Surveillance technology and spyware are being used to target and suppress journalists, dissidents, and human rights advocates everywhere. Surveillance Watch is an interactive map that documents the hidden connections within the opaque surveillance industry. Founded by privacy advocates, most of whom were personally harmed by surveillance tech, our mission is to shed light on the companies profiting from this exploitation with significant risk to our lives. By mapping out the intricate web of surveillance companies, their subsidiaries, partners, and financial backers, we hope to expose the enablers fueling this industry’s extensive rights violations, ensuring they cannot evade accountability for being complicit in this abuse. Surveillance Watch is a community-driven initiative, and we rely on submissions from individuals passionate about protecting privacy and human rights.”
Yes, the site makes it easy to contribute information to its roundup. Anonymously, if one desires. The site’s information is divided into three alphabetical lists: Surveilling Entities, Known Targets, and Funding Organizations. As an example, here is what the service says about safeXai (formerly Banjo):
“safeXai is the entity that has quietly resumed the operations of Banjo, a digital surveillance company whose founder, Damien Patton, was a former Ku Klux Klan member who’d participated in a 1990 drive-by shooting of a synagogue near Nashville, Tennessee. Banjo developed real-time surveillance technology that monitored social media, traffic cameras, satellites, and other sources to detect and report on events as they unfolded. In Utah, Banjo’s technology was used by law enforcement agencies.”
We notice there are no substantive links which could have been included, like ones to footage of the safeXai surveillance video service or the firm’s remarkable body of patents. In our view, these patents represent an X-ray look at what most firms call artificial intelligence.
A few other names we recognize are IBM, Palantir, and Pegasus owner NSO Group. See the site for many more. The Known Targets page lists countries that, when clicked, list surveilling entities known or believed to be operating there. Entries on the Funding Organizations page include a brief description of each organization with a clickable list of surveillance apps it is known or believed to fund at the bottom. It is not clear how the site vets its entries, but the submission form does include boxes for supporting URL(s) and any files to upload. It also asks whether one consents to be contacted for more information.
Cynthia Murrell, October 1, 2024
Zapping the Ghost Comms Service
September 23, 2024
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
Europol generated a news release titled “Global Coalition Takes Down New Criminal Communication Platform.” One would think that bad actors would have learned a lesson from the ANOM operation and from the take downs of other specialized communication services purpose built for bad actors. The Europol announcement explains:
Europol and Eurojust, together with law enforcement and judicial authorities from around the world, have successfully dismantled an encrypted communication platform that was established to facilitate serious and organized crime perpetrated by dangerous criminal networks operating on a global scale. The platform, known as Ghost, was used as a tool to carry out a wide range of criminal activities, including large-scale drug trafficking, money laundering, instances of extreme violence and other forms of serious and organized crime.
Eurojust, as you probably know, is the EU’s agency responsible for dealing with judicial cooperation in criminal matters among agencies. The entity was set up 2002 and concerns itself serious crime and cutting through the red tape to bring alleged bad actors to court. The dynamic of Europol and Eurojust is to investigate and prosecute with efficiency.
Two cyber investigators recognize that the bad actors can exploit the information environment to create more E2EE systems. Thanks, MSFT Copilot. You do a reasonable job of illustrating chaos. Good enough.
The marketing-oriented name of the system is or rather was Ghost. Here’s how Europol describes the system:
Users could purchase the tool without declaring any personal information. The solution used three encryption standards and offered the option to send a message followed by a specific code which would result in the self-destruction of all messages on the target phone. This allowed criminal networks to communicate securely, evade detection, counter forensic measures, and coordinate their illegal operations across borders. Worldwide, several thousand people used the tool, which has its own infrastructure and applications with a network of resellers based in several countries. On a global scale, around one thousand messages are being exchanged each day via Ghost.
With law enforcement compromising certain bad actor-centric systems like Ghost, what are the consequences of these successful shutdowns? Here’s what Europol says:
The encrypted communication landscape has become increasingly fragmented as a result of recent law enforcement actions targeting platforms used by criminal networks. Following these operations, numerous once-popular encrypted services have been shut down or disrupted, leading to a splintering of the market. Criminal actors, in response, are now turning to a variety of less-established or custom-built communication tools that offer varying degrees of security and anonymity. By doing so, they seek new technical solutions and also utilize popular communication applications to diversify their methods. This strategy helps these actors avoid exposing their entire criminal operations and networks on a single platform, thereby mitigating the risk of interception. Consequently, the landscape of encrypted communications remains highly dynamic and segmented, posing ongoing challenges for law enforcement.
Nevertheless, some entities want to create secure apps designed to allow criminal behaviors to thrive. These range from “me too” systems like one allegedly in development by a known bad actor to knock offs of sophisticated hardware-software systems which operate within the public Internet. Are bad actors more innovative than the whiz kids at the largest high-technology companies? Nope. Based on my team’s research, notable sources of ideas to create problems for law enforcement include:
- Scanning patent applications for nifty ideas. Modern patent search systems make the identification of novel ideas reasonably straightforward
- Hiring one or more university staff to identify and get students to develop certain code components as part of a normal class project
- Using open source methods and coming up with ad hoc ways to obfuscate what’s being done. (Hats off to the open source folks, of course.)
- Buying technology from middle “men” who won’t talk about their customers. (Is that too much information, Mr. Oligarch’s tech expert?)
Like much in today’s digital world or what I call the datasphere, each successful takedown provides limited respite. The global cat-and-mouse game between government authorities and bad actors is what some at the Santa Fe Institute might call “emergent behavior” at the boundary between entropy and chaos. That’s a wonderful insight despite suggesting another consequence of living at the edge of chaos.
Stephen E Arnold, September 23, 2024
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The Fixed Network Lawful Interception Business is Booming
September 11, 2024
It is not just bad actors who profit from an increase in cybercrime. Makers of software designed to catch them are cashing in, too. The Market Research Report 224 blog shares “Fixed Network Lawful Interception Market Region Insights.” Lawful interception is the process by which law enforcement agencies, after obtaining the proper warrants of course, surveil circuit and packet-mode communications. The report shares findings from a study by Data Bridge Market Research on this growing sector. Between 2021 and 2028, this market is expected to grow by nearly 20% annually and hit an estimated value of $5,340 million. We learn:
“Increase in cybercrimes in the era of digitalization is a crucial factor accelerating the market growth, also increase in number of criminal activities, significant increase in interception warrants, rising surge in volume of data traffic and security threats, rise in the popularity of social media communications, rising deployment of 5G networks in all developed and developing economies, increasing number of interception warrants and rising government of both emerging and developed nations are progressively adopting lawful interception for decrypting and monitoring digital and analog information, which in turn increases the product demand and rising virtualization of advanced data centers to enhance security in virtual networks enabling vendors to offer cloud-based interception solutions are the major factors among others boosting the fixed network lawful interception market.”
Furthermore, the pace of these developments will likely increase over the next few years. The write-up specifies key industry players, a list we found particularly useful:
“The major players covered in fixed network lawful interception market report are Utimaco GmbH, VOCAL TECHNOLOGIES, AQSACOM, Inc, Verint, BAE Systems., Cisco Systems, Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson, Atos SE, SS8 Networks, Inc, Trovicor, Matison is a subsidiary of Sedam IT Ltd, Shoghi Communications Ltd, Comint Systems and Solutions Pvt Ltd – Corp Office, Signalogic, IPS S.p.A, ZephyrTel, EVE compliancy solutions and Squire Technologies Ltd among other domestic and global players.”
See the press release for notes on Data Bridge’s methodology. It promises 350 pages of information, complete with tables and charts, for those who purchase a license. Formed in 2014, Data Bridge is based in Haryana, India.
Cynthia Murrell, September 11, 2024
Thoughts about the Dark Web
August 8, 2024
This essay is the work of a dumb humanoid. No smart software required.
![green-dino_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_t[2]](https://arnoldit.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/green-dino_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_t2.gif "green-dino_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_t[2]")
The Dark Web. Wow. YouTube offers a number of tell-all videos about the Dark Web. Articles explain the topics one can find on certain Dark Web fora. What’s forgotten is that the number of users of the Dark Web has been chugging along, neither gaining tens of millions of users or losing tens of millions of users. Why? Here’s a traffic chart from the outfit that sort of governs The Onion Router:
Source: https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-relay-country.html
The chart is not the snappiest item on the sprawling Torproject.org Web site, but the message seems to be that TOR has been bouncing around two million users this year. Go back in time and the number has increased, but not much. Online statistics, particularly those associated with obfuscation software, are mushy. Let’s toss in another couple million users to account for alternative obfuscation services. What happens? We are not in the tens of millions.
Our research suggests that the stability of TOR usage is due to several factors:
- The hard core bad actors comprise a small percentage of the TOR usage and probably do more outside of TOR than within it. In September 2024 I will be addressing this topic at a cyber fraud conference.
- The number of entities indexing the “Dark Web” remains relatively stable. Sure, some companies drop out of this data harvesting but the big outfits remain and their software looks a lot like a user, particularly with some of the wonky verification Dark Web sites use to block automated collection of data.
- Regular Internet users don’t pay much attention to TOR, including those with the one-click access browsers like Brave.
- Human investigators are busy looking and interacting, but the numbers of these professionals also remains relatively stable.
To sum up, most people know little about the Dark Web. When these individuals figure out how to access a Web site advertising something exciting like stolen credit cards or other illegal products and services, they are unaware of a simple fact: An investigator from some country maybe operating like a bad actor to find a malefactor. By the way, the Dark Web is not as big as some cyber companies assert. The actual number of truly bad Dark Web sites is fewer than 100, based on what my researchers tell me.
A very “good” person approaches an individual who looks like a very tough dude. The very “good” person has a special job for the touch dude. Surprise! Thanks, MSFT Copilot. Good enough and you should know what certain professionals look like.
I read “Former Pediatrician Stephanie Russell Sentenced in Murder Plot.” The story is surprisingly not that unique. The reason I noted a female pediatrician’s involvement in the Dark Web is that she lives about three miles from my office. The story is that the good doctor visited the Dark Web and hired a hit man to terminate an individual. (Don’t doctors know how to terminate as part of their studies?)
The write up reports:
A Louisville judge sentenced former pediatrician Stephanie Russell to 12 years in prison Wednesday for attempting to hire a hitman to kill her ex-husband multiple times.
I love the somewhat illogical phrase “kill her ex-husband multiple times.”
Russell pleaded guilty April 22, 2024, to stalking her former spouse and trying to have him killed amid a protracted custody battle over their two children. By accepting responsibility and avoiding a trial, Russell would have expected a lighter prison sentence. However, she again tried to find a hitman, this time asking inmates to help with the search, prosecutors alleged in court documents asking for a heftier prison sentence.
One rumor circulating at the pub which is a popular lunch spot near the doctor’s former office is that she used the Dark Web and struck up an online conversation with one of the investigators monitoring such activity.
Net net: The Dark Web is indeed interesting.
Stephen E Arnold, August 8, 2024
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