Posts matching tags 'steganography'
2007/6/15
Apparently the Mafia used a radio station in Naples to send instructions to hitmen encoded in song requests.
(via xrrf) ¶ [no comments]
2005/8/11
In 2003, the CIA found what it thought were al-Qaeda terrorist instructions encoded in the al-Jazeera news ticker. The "instructions" detected by the CIA's steganalysis software included dates, flight numbers and the coordinates of targets including the White House and the small town of Tappahannock, Virginia, and resulted in the national terror alert level being raised from "extra-severe" to "brown trouser time" and almost 30 flights being cancelled. That is, until it emerged that the "hidden messages" were just the result of random noise, coincidence and the human pattern-finding instinct:
The problem with hunting messages hidden by steganography is that there are so few of them, any computer program will come up with false positives - messages that aren't really there. "The false positive rate, even if it's vanishingly small, starts to throw signals at you that makes you want to believe you're seeing messages. And somebody could be fooled by that if they didn't understand the nature of steganography," says Honeyman.This happened some time after it was discovered that al-Qaeda weren't hiding terrorist instructions in images on internet porn sites.
2004/4/9
Via Slashdot, an intriguing PowerPoint presentation (PDF) analysing spam, and using techniques to determine its origins. Among other claims it makes, spam intended to sell things is in the minority, and a lot of spam consists of other spammers' ads, resent to either identify valid recipients or to act as a carrier for encrypted messages between IRC groups. (It doesn't say anything about al-Qaeda terrorist cells or the like, but one imagines that if someone want to send coded instructions to covert operatives without disclosing their locations to traffic analysis, this would be a hell of a lot less conspicuous than mailing a Hotmail address accessed from a net café in Baluchistan or someplace.)
2003/8/26
Gibson's law applied to blackmail: Dutch blackmailer uses steganography to cover tracks, instructing victim to post bank card info encoded in a photograph in a fake car ad on an auction site. He then accessed the site through a US-based anonymiser. Mind you, the fact that the FBI nailed him in 24 hours nonetheless is somewhat thought-provoking. (via Techdirt)
2003/2/13
A Valentine's Day card has caused a homeland security alert in Pittsburgh; the man who bought the card for his daughter noticed that it contained the word "Jihad", and the message "It's Time To Be Mine". Could Osama bin Laden be using Valentine's Day cards to communicate with his sleeper agents?
2001/2/7
Those wily, inscrutable Arab terrorists are up to no good again; this time they're hiding terrorist attack plans in Internet porn and chat rooms. Or so say unnamed "U.S. officials and experts". Though for all we know the officials in question may be Bible-bashing anti-porn zealots in Bush's cabinet or some aspiring J. Edgar Hoover seeking to justify sweeping surveillance powers. (via Robot Wisdom)