3 ms·

What was gained by regular nickname changes?

• zdkl 10y ago
  It could help further obfuscate the usage patterns of the underlying actors. If you change the parameters, the party doing search and correlations needs to take that into account and expend more effort. Basically, you want to make them work harder to ascertain any bit of information
  • joncrocks 10y ago
    I think I'd better describe it as helping in the case of identifying information being correlated over time. Even if you've got good OpSec, you may reveal things about yourself accidentally over time, and with a long-lived nickname, this could potentially narrow down your identity. Things like colloquialisms/references that are culturally specific/indicative, or reference to things that indicate things about yourself by association. This could potentially be counteracted by analysing usage patterns/language patterns to try and associate a set of nicknames as 'the same person', but it's probably hard-ish to do if communication is terse + sparse.
    • dsfyu404ed 10y ago
      This. You leak little personal details about who you are. Word usage analysis could be used to track a member across multiple usernames but frequent username changes is just part of defense in depth.
• divbyzer0 10y ago
  Reminds me of the film Reservoir Dogs. Each gang member is given a nickname (Mr. Blue, Mr Pink etc) for each job. Only the leadership picks the names, the nicknames change with each job\event. Members do not share real names or personally identifiable info. The benefits include: Plausible deniability about duration of membership. Plausible deniability about which jobs\events member was party to. Compartmentalization of the enterprise. I'm struggling to find a legal use case where this could be applied. Although political dissidents (with recent events in Turkey in mind) may have to break the law in any case.