OT:Terrorism/steganography

[Flying dutchman]

It is suspected that terrorists use steganography to transfer messages over the internet. Steganography is the technique to hide text inside files such as images, wave files, and even text files, by manipulating bits/pixels in these files. These slight modifications are invisible to the eye and inaudible to the ear.
These files can then be distributed on homepages and "binary" newsgroups and nobody even notices it. Maybe you even have a Pamela Anderson desktop background with a hidden message of a terrorist group!

I encourage everybody to actively search for such hidden messages in order to track down the pathetic maniacs that caused yesterday's suffering. Spread the word!

[JoeDaring]

FD,
this is very interesting but... how can we try and search for those hidden messages?

would be nice to know!

Ciao

Joe

[iparout]

Yes,

let's just hunt down all those bastards by searching the "whole" Internet for hidden messages. It would be **sooo** easy to discover. The US secret service depends on us.

Come on guys... Get a grip.

P.S. : I wonder how silly a man can be these days.

[Flying dutchman]

Think twice before you call it silly. It IS possible, and there's no need to scan the whole internet at all.

Let me give you two existing, albeit very different examples:

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Example #1 (maybe not a good one): SETI.


Or, to speak with your own words, "How silly can a man be these days, trying to scan the whole universe for hidden messages".
Still it is being done, and millions of people are involved. It is becoming a global sport...

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Example #2: Spambots.

"Spambots" automatically scan all usenet articles for e-mail addresses. The e-mail addresses found are then used for mailing lists. I agree that's a silly and even anti-social thing to do, but it's done nonetheless. As soon as you post an article in a usenet newsgroup, and use a "real" sender address, you can expect your mailbox to fill-up with unsollicited messages before long. "Make a million $$$ investing only $1.". Sounds familiar?

----------------------------------------------------------------------
It is VERY easy to invisibly hide text information in usenet messages by manipulating the punctuation and the blanks.
It's even easier in images and sound files. Search the internet for the word "steganography" and you'll find lots of freeware programs that can do just this. There's nothing to it, I could write one of those proggies myself.

Steganography is becoming a major security issue beause it's so EASY. News servers exchange messages between each other and world-wide, so a message posted in the middle-east reaches your local news server in a matter of minutes.

So, using the "spambot" principle, it should be easy to scan all newsgroups (especially the *binaries.pictures* ones) of your local newsserver for embedded hidden messages. Even if the messages are encrypted using PGP or something like that, it should be possible to do some backtracking to the sender.

[AlgoRhythm]

Ever heard of anonymous remailers? Combined with an e-mail to usenet gateway, no you couldn't trace it back to the sender...


AlgoRhythm

[mikiem]

[Insert disclaimer here] ie. for what it's worth and all that...

The idea of hiding info in pictures has been around for quite some time now, was even practiced a bit with corporate security to my knowledge with the hand carrying of actual prints as a step up from the microfilm dots 007 obligingly aquainted us with.

Today with digital images posted all over the web, it really is a trivial task to post whatever info all over the place, the problem being there are just too many pictures for a limited number of individuals, say even a gov agency to manually scan.

I read somewhere that the folks probably in question liked to use black and white porno pix -- if nothing else that's enough incentive right there for some folks to go looking ("really honey -- just doing my part for national security!" ;-) )

Still, thoughts of all communities starting efforts at the grass roots level to help self monitor the web or net are not misplaced. Corporate will gladly step in, incidentally holding all sorts of copyright proposals in their back pockets... Or the gov.s will step in and you know the rest.

Myself... SETI was mentioned, albeit in other tones; I wouldn't mind running some similar applet that crunched numbers in the background contributing to some scanning effort. Nor would I mind running a browser plugin -- closest analogy I can think of is the digimark technology.

mikie