In line with a brand new investigation, a network of websites that the CIA ran in the 2000s included gaming shops and a Star Wars fan web site as a way to talk with potential sources all through the world. Proof means that this effort was additionally fairly messy and probably harmful for the company’s efforts, contributing to a number of CIA sources being uncovered.
A safety researcher named Ciro Santilli lately printed an in depth report on his work to find and catalogue this community, offering immense element into how this operation occurred. In essence, the CIA seems to have operated websites like starwarsweb.web (try the Wayback Machine’s snapshot from 2010) as shells that hid instruments designed to allow covert communication.
Researchers like Santilli have been in a position to discover and characterize this community of web sites because of a sequence of technical missteps by the CIA. For example, as described in 404 Media’s reporting, most of the web sites had sequential IP addresses, and associated websites had been simply revealed by means of fundamental DNS lookup providers. Along with starwarsweb.web, the CIA additionally seems to have created a number of gaming-focused web sites. Amongst these are havenofgamerz.com, activegaminginfo.com, and myonlinegamingsource.com (all hyperlinks to Wayback Machine snapshots).
The CIA’s web site community was revealed in a Reuters report from 2022 to be on the heart of a disastrous intelligence failure that resulted in various informants and sources being compromised. The Reuters story targeted specifically on how Iran’s regime was in a position to establish informants by uncovering the CIA’s communications channels hidden in Iranian-focused web sites. The knowledge supplied on this report–including names and screenshots of wesbites–gave Santilli the traces he wanted to dig into the bigger community.
The intelligence operation was in depth, concentrating on many alternative international locations all through the world, and the processes to analysis the operation after the very fact have been much more complicated. Should you’re involved in studying extra concerning the investigation, I extremely suggest testing 404’s article, which incorporates extra element from Santilli himself.
