4 ms·

One way of dealing with intrusions like this is to leak documents with subtle design flaws in them, rather than correct designs. If enough of the stolen materia

One way of dealing with intrusions like this is to leak documents with subtle design flaws in them, rather than correct designs. If enough of the stolen material requires checks by skilled engineers before use, it dramatically reduces the value of the stolen material. (Of course, this requires the intrusion to be detected before it is over.) EDIT: See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_pipeline_sabotage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_pipeline_sabotage , with the caveat that it's not clear how real the story is.

blisterpeanuts 12y ago
Not a bad idea. Maybe they could name the flawed documents as "Blah Blah Blah [Final].doc" or "... [Corrected].doc" to throw them off the trail. Meanwhile, verbally inform internal staff to ignore anything with "final" in the title. It might cause some confusion from time to time, such as with new staff, and of course some dumb person will end up mentioning the practice in a document, thus blowing the secret. But it will still make the intruders' job harder.
mortov 12y ago
It is standard practice in classified material communities to have carefully controlled variants of documents and a log of where and when the subtle variations go in order to detect and source leaks of information. When any particular area is detected as suspect, misinformation dressed up to look more valuable is then carefully spread in that direction to see who takes the bait. They are then either used to send misinformation or, if they have served their purpose or have nothing to offer, removed (fired/imprisoned or whatever is appropriate). The Americans (TV Series) had a couple of themes based around this - it's not exactly a secret strategy and receivers of information know to verify what they get before getting too excited. Since we're talking about government actors here, nowadays they would not be easily fooled and would have skilled engineers checking stuff no matter what, so that is not going to add any 'cost' to the operation. People in the espionage game learn pretty quickly or they don't get to play for very long.

blisterpeanuts 12y ago

Not a bad idea. Maybe they could name the flawed documents as "Blah Blah Blah [Final].doc" or "... [Corrected].doc" to throw them off the trail. Meanwhile, verbally inform internal staff to ignore anything with "final" in the title. It might cause some confusion from time to time, such as with new staff, and of course some dumb person will end up mentioning the practice in a document, thus blowing the secret. But it will still make the intruders' job harder.

mortov 12y ago

It is standard practice in classified material communities to have carefully controlled variants of documents and a log of where and when the subtle variations go in order to detect and source leaks of information. When any particular area is detected as suspect, misinformation dressed up to look more valuable is then carefully spread in that direction to see who takes the bait. They are then either used to send misinformation or, if they have served their purpose or have nothing to offer, removed (fired/imprisoned or whatever is appropriate). The Americans (TV Series) had a couple of themes based around this - it's not exactly a secret strategy and receivers of information know to verify what they get before getting too excited. Since we're talking about government actors here, nowadays they would not be easily fooled and would have skilled engineers checking stuff no matter what, so that is not going to add any 'cost' to the operation. People in the espionage game learn pretty quickly or they don't get to play for very long.