grugq

19 ms·

1. 151.▲
   by grugq 13y ago

   Informants are the greatest fear of all clandestine organisations. The reason for this is that they are privy to sensitive information that can be used to damage other members of the organisation. Read the links I posted. Read this analysis
2. 152.▲
   by grugq 13y ago

   Without performing "lessons learned" analysis on failures, how will we ever learn? Conducting this sort of exercise is critical to improving the capabilities of everyone who engages in clandestine activities. Dismissing it out of
3. 153.▲
   by grugq 13y ago

   Yeah. He should have lammed it as soon as the feds first talked to him. Really he should have run much sooner. At that point, the only option for him would have been life as a fugitive on the FBIs most wanted list. It was too late. The key
4. 154.▲
   by grugq 13y ago

   It is covered in the Complaint. Essentially someone using the alias FriendlyChemist (FC) gained illegal access to a vendor's account, and possibly to a lot more. This gave FC a large trove of PII on SilkRoad buyers and sellers (names,
5. 155.▲
   by grugq 13y ago

   Yes, particularly for the second "hit" that he arranged (the one in the Complaint). However, the first "hit" (outlined in the Maryland indictment) seems to have been more of a set piece entrapment-alike. This was when he
6. 156.▲
   by grugq 13y ago

   There are almost no organisations that expect a code of silence indefinitely. It is not really a practical expectation of a human being. Most covert organisations (e.g. Hizbollah [0], KGB [1], IRA [2]) will expect their agents to remain sil
7. 157.▲
   by grugq 13y ago

   Start with this piece "observations on OPSEC" http://grugq.tumblr.com/post/61960027685/observations-on-ops... which sets out some broad outlines of what is involved.
8. 158.▲
   by grugq 13y ago

   Yeah, it is.
9. 159.▲
   by grugq 13y ago

   Sorry.
10. 160.▲
    by grugq 13y ago

    Now, yes. But Dread Pirate Roberts should have fled as soon as the first Congressman said "why can't we shut down Silk Road?"
11. 161.▲
    by grugq 13y ago

    I am very surprised he remained in the US. I would have thought he'd take his BTC and run off to live with McAfee in Belize.
12. 162.▲
    by grugq 13y ago

    ta.
13. 163.▲
    by grugq 13y ago

    The issue is less about any specific ideology, but rather the social environment he was immersed in. Other than radicals, drug seekers, drug dealers and undercover law enforcement officials, he doesnt seem have had much social interaction.
14. 164.▲
    by grugq 13y ago

    For "basestation" read "the network". The partitioning of responsibility within a GSM network is relevant to this attack only in regards to which component maintains the "signals-pending table". There are a num
15. 165.▲
    by grugq 13y ago

    This is a simple race condition exploiting the baroque way that GSM signalling works. When a call (or an SMS) comes in: * the basestation will send an alert to the mobile phone ("contact me, I've got something for you") * the
16. 166.▲
    by grugq 13y ago

    You got that so close, but wrong. Cloud services are inherently insecure because you don't have physical control over the devices containing your data. You have to trust that the remote end is secure, and exploiting trust is what intel
17. 167.▲
    by grugq 13y ago

    There is some more indepth info on problems with trusting Tor (or any off the shelf "anonymity" solution) here: http://grugq.github.io/blog/2013/06/14/you-cant-get-there-fr... Also there's