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Via the trying glass: The web has seen its fair proportion of bizarre, however a Star Wars fan web site secretly run by the CIA to speak with abroad spies would possibly high the checklist. StarWarsWeb.internet seemed like some other 2010-era fan web page, full with lightsabers, Yoda quotes (“Like these video games you’ll”), LEGO adverts, and hyped-up mentions of video games like Battlefront 2 and The Pressure Unleashed II. However behind that nostalgic facade was a covert login system. In case you entered the suitable password into the search bar, you’d unlock a safe line to CIA handlers. Or at the very least, that was the plan.
This weird piece of intel comes courtesy of Ciro Santilli, an unbiased researcher with a knack for rooting across the dusty corners of the net, who spoke to 404media.
Santili took it upon himself to dig deeper after a Reuters uncovering piece titled “America’s Throwaway Spies” revealed a handful of suspicious domains again in 2022. Armed with little greater than open-source instruments, net dev know-how, and apparently infinite persistence, he ended up uncovering lots of of comparable websites.
Because it turned out, the Star Wars web page was only one star in a galaxy of CIA-run covert communication websites.
There have been comedy pages, excessive sports activities websites, and even a Brazilian music fan web page. Some have been clearly geared towards customers in states like Iran and China, the place their discovery led to devastating penalties, together with the execution of CIA sources round 2011-2012. However others appeared to focus on France, Germany, Spain, and Brazil.
The deadly flaw, in accordance with each Santilli and the Reuters report, was that lots of the websites have been sloppily coded, reusing sequential IP addresses or different simply traceable breadcrumbs. As soon as one web site was discovered, figuring out others was typically only a matter of fundamental detective work. This was one thing Iranian and Chinese language counterintelligence groups apparently found out over a decade in the past. You possibly can learn this in additional element on Santilli’s writeup.
Regardless of the lethal fallout, this digital forensics saga is now a chilly case. Santilli described it as being “like a museum,” saying that due to the Wayback Machine, folks can nonetheless return and consider the location.
All stated, fifteen years later, the CIA’s try at geek-coded spycraft stays a cautionary story that even intelligence businesses are solely human. And that on the web, your secrets and techniques have a shelf life.
