Friday, July 02, 2010

Russian Spies Use Pretty Wimpy Methods Techwise

You would think the successors to the mighty KGB would be a little better at transmitting Top Secret data.

The FBI said that one of the suspects, Anna Chapman, would go to a coffee shop in Manhattan on Wednesdays and set up her laptop. A little while later, a minivan the FBI knew was used by a Russian official would drive by. To the naked eye, there was no contact between them.

But the FBI said it figured out that Chapman's computer was set to link wirelessly to a laptop in the minivan, using a standard, built-in Wi-Fi chip. In the short time the computers were close, they could transfer encrypted files between each other.

The agency figured this out with commercial Wi-Fi analysis software, not with something from Q's lab.

Yup she just connected to a regular wireless network sent out by a Russian official from a minivan. No secret networks or hidden drop sites or anything like that. Hell, even sending coded messages in the newspaper to a hidden drop box would have been harder to crack.

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