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Russia carried out a 'stunning' breach of FBI communications system

46 points by prostoalex 7y ago

ac4tw 7y ago
Great article @prostoalex--gets excellent 1/2 way in with the details I was looking for. Esp. interested in more on this: 'A major concern was that Russian spies with physical proximity to sensitive U.S. buildings might be exfiltrating pilfered data that had “jumped the air gap,” i.e., that the Russians were collecting information from a breach of computers not connected to the Internet, said former officials. One factor behind U.S. intelligence officials’ fears was simple: The CIA had already figured out how to perform similar operations themselves, according to a former senior CIA officer directly familiar with the matter. “We felt it was pretty revolutionary stuff at the time,” the former CIA officer said. “It allowed us to do some extraordinary things.”'
- alexfromapex 7y ago
  Seems like it should’ve been classified and not something they should’ve admitted in an interview
SmileyRedBall 7y ago
“was to retaliate for Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election” I suspect the entire rationale for these type of stories is to get the ‘Russia hacked the US election’ meme into the zeitgeist.
m0zg 7y ago
>> The Russians are able to extract every capability from any given technology. And that's how you know you're reading fake news made up horseshit. Full disclosure: dual Russian and US citizen. Lived most of my life in the US.
blantonl 7y ago
My bets here are the Russians probably were tracking the encrypted simplex (short range unit to unit) communications of the FBI's counterintelligence teams. I believe even in 2012 those would have been simplex Project-25 (P25) digital voice encrypted with AES-256. If the Russians simply sent out a subject they suspected of being watched by the counter intelligence teams and then had their own teams monitor for encrypted P25 simplex comms within the general vicinity of the subject, they would know that the subject was indeed being watched. Even though it's almost certain that the Russians were not able to actually decrypt AES-256 P25 transmissions, there are a number of key meta-data variables in the FBI's simplex P25 communications that would be available. The Unit ID of the portable radio, and the current KeyID of the AES-256 encryption. Presumably, the counter-intel teams had their own personnel assigned radios which have unique P25 unit IDs, and most likely had their own team unique AES encryption keys loaded into the radios. If you couple the ability to monitor each of those metadata variables with knowing that simplex communications are short range (local to just you) and even employ some rudimentary DF (direction finding) capabilities into the equation, and it would be very simple for the Russians to determine which of their assets were being tracked by the FBIs counter-intel teams, and even possibly which individual agents were part of the tracking and close to the target (by cross-referencing P25 unit IDs)

46 points by prostoalex 7y ago

Great article @prostoalex--gets excellent 1/2 way in with the details I was looking for. Esp. interested in more on this: 'A major concern was that Russian spies with physical proximity to sensitive U.S. buildings might be exfiltrating pilfered data that had “jumped the air gap,” i.e., that the Russians were collecting information from a breach of computers not connected to the Internet, said former officials. One factor behind U.S. intelligence officials’ fears was simple: The CIA had already figured out how to perform similar operations themselves, according to a former senior CIA officer directly familiar with the matter. “We felt it was pretty revolutionary stuff at the time,” the former CIA officer said. “It allowed us to do some extraordinary things.”'

alexfromapex 7y ago
Seems like it should’ve been classified and not something they should’ve admitted in an interview

SmileyRedBall 7y ago

“was to retaliate for Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election” I suspect the entire rationale for these type of stories is to get the ‘Russia hacked the US election’ meme into the zeitgeist.

m0zg 7y ago

>> The Russians are able to extract every capability from any given technology. And that's how you know you're reading fake news made up horseshit. Full disclosure: dual Russian and US citizen. Lived most of my life in the US.

blantonl 7y ago

My bets here are the Russians probably were tracking the encrypted simplex (short range unit to unit) communications of the FBI's counterintelligence teams. I believe even in 2012 those would have been simplex Project-25 (P25) digital voice encrypted with AES-256. If the Russians simply sent out a subject they suspected of being watched by the counter intelligence teams and then had their own teams monitor for encrypted P25 simplex comms within the general vicinity of the subject, they would know that the subject was indeed being watched. Even though it's almost certain that the Russians were not able to actually decrypt AES-256 P25 transmissions, there are a number of key meta-data variables in the FBI's simplex P25 communications that would be available. The Unit ID of the portable radio, and the current KeyID of the AES-256 encryption. Presumably, the counter-intel teams had their own personnel assigned radios which have unique P25 unit IDs, and most likely had their own team unique AES encryption keys loaded into the radios. If you couple the ability to monitor each of those metadata variables with knowing that simplex communications are short range (local to just you) and even employ some rudimentary DF (direction finding) capabilities into the equation, and it would be very simple for the Russians to determine which of their assets were being tracked by the FBIs counter-intel teams, and even possibly which individual agents were part of the tracking and close to the target (by cross-referencing P25 unit IDs)