The trade name for this type of spying is the “honey trap.” And it turns out that both men and women are equally adept at setting one — and equally vulnerable to tumbling in. Spies use sex, intelligence, and the thrill of a secret life as bait. Cleverness, training, character, and patriotism are often no defense against a well-set honey trap. And as in normal life, no planning can take into account that a romance begun in deceit might actually turn into a genuine, passionate affair. In fact, when an East German honey trap was exposed in 1997, one of the women involved refused to believe she had been deceived, even when presented with the evidence. “No, that’s not true,” she insisted. “He really loved me.”
Category Archives: Security
Making Quite an Impression
Lock picking with advanced foil impressioning
All you need to do now is put some turning pressure on the key and make small ‘up and down’ movements. The pins that are not in the correct position will bind and become stuck in the lock. These pins will push the tape in a little when the key is pushed upwards, and in the next round of ‘turning and rocking the key up and down’ these binding pins will keep pushing in the tape deeper and deeper until shear line is reached. The interesting thing is that once a pin reaches the ’shear line’ (opening position), it is no longer stuck and will not push in the tape deeper. The key will fit itself …
Tinker, Tailor …
Tale of a Would-Be Spy, Buried Treasure, and Uncrackable Code
When officials searched the aspiring spy, they found a paper tucked under the insole of his right shoe. On it were written the addresses of several Iraqi and Chinese embassies in Europe. In a trouser pocket they discovered a spiral pad in which Regan, who had been trained in cryptanalysis by the Air Force, had written 13 seemingly unconnected words — like tricycle, rocket, and glove. Another 26 words were written on an index card. In his wallet was a paper with a string of several dozen letters and numbers beginning “5-6-N-V-O-A- I …” And in a folder Regan had been carrying, they found four pages filled with three-digit numbers, or trinomes: 952, 832, 041, and so on. The spiral pad, the index card, the wallet note, and the sheets of trinomes: The FBI suddenly had four puzzles to solve.
Skimmer
Would You Have Spotted the Fraud?
This has me leaning toward never using an “unprotected” ATM again (i.e. not indoors or otherwise in a reasonably secure environment).
It's No Masterpiece
Here’s a little perspective: FiveThirtyEight: The Odds of Airborne Terror
Over the past decade, according to BTS, there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures.
There is an underlying Maginot mentality to the way the TSA implements most security measures.
Spilling State Secrets
I had no idea that I could have let the proverbial cat out of the bag when I linked to different ways of lacing/tying your shoes. But it turns out that the CIA used lacing patterns as ways to send messages (slideshow). It’s the visual part of Tinker, tailor, soldier… illusionist?
“The instant the performer sees the spectator take a cigarette, cigar, or pipe, he takes the packet of matches from his pocket, tears off one match, and holds packet and match ready to ignite the match,” the magician John Mulholland wrote in a manual in the 1950s. “He does these things openly because what he does can only be looked upon as a friendly and courteous gesture.”
Mulholland’s instructions were written not for stage magicians, but for the covert operatives of the CIA. At the height of the Cold War – in the era of nuclear missiles and submarines, amid the tangled cloak-and-dagger maneuverings of espionage and counterespionage – the agency was also secretly doing something else. It was trying to learn to do magic.
Fortunately it’s all been declassified. Whew!
Dear Sir: Trick or Treat
Letters of Note: The Masked Letter
Written by a frustrated Lt. General Sir Henry Clinton during the Revolutionary War in 1777, this beautifully crafted Masked Letter is a perfect example of early coded correspondence. The letter reads perfectly well on its own, however only when you place a mask over the paper does the true meaning appear. Incredibly clever, and surprisingly successful as both the letter and mask were sent to the recipient (in this case John Burgoyne) along different routes.
No Butts About it: Truth is Stranger than Fiction
An assassination attempt, with emphasis on ass: the bomb was concealed in the orifice of choice for concealing items. I’d say convenient orifice, but it’s probably not all that convenient.
The bomb couldn’t be that big, and water (being a large fraction of the human body) isn’t very good shrapnel.
While the assassination proved unsuccessful, AQAP had been able to shift the operational paradigm in a manner that allowed them to achieve tactical surprise. The surprise was complete and the Saudis did not see the attack coming — the operation could have succeeded had it been better executed.
We know this wasn’t The Onion because there is no remark about how hindsight is 20-20, mention of a thorough probe of the incident, or talk of a push for new security measures. Or discussion of market penetration of security technology. (Oh, strike that last one. They say it here)
Via Schneier, who cautions us not to tell the TSA.
Who was Right? Huxley v. Orwell
Explained with cartoons. Amusing ourselves to death
Oh, crap.
Related — paraphrase of a quote I heard: For years we’ve been worried about the government spooks (FBI, CIA, NSA et. al) monitoring us against our will. Little did we know that all it would require to blissfully go down that path was to make cell phones widely available.
Picky, Picky, Picky
Schneier on Security: Lockpicking and the Internet
Earlier this year, Schlage launched a series of locks that can be opened either by a key, a four-digit code, or the Internet. That’s right: The lock is online. You can send the lock SMS messages or talk to it via a Website, and the lock can send you messages when someone opens it — or even when someone tries to open it and fails.
Sounds nifty, but putting a lock on the Internet opens up a whole new set of problems, none of which we fully understand. Even worse: Security is only as strong as the weakest link. Schlage’s system combines the inherent “pickability” of a physical lock, the new vulnerabilities of electronic keypads, and the hacking risk of online. For most applications, that’s simply too much risk.