I expected to see something along the lines of vans with directional antennas driving around Moscow listening for spurious emissions from local oscillators of superheterodyne receivers 465 kHz away from the number station frequency, as in Operation RAFTER.
Only if it's poorly designed (leaks local oscillator frequency back into antenna) and not shielded.
Modern receivers use quadrature sampling detectors rather than traditional superheterodyne. In that setup any leakage would be on the same frequency and harder to detect.
It is as good as impossible to run an oscillator based receiver that is also connected to an antenna that does not radiate. That's nothing to do with poor design, it's just physics. Zero coupling does not exist in practice. By design the mixer stage sits pretty close to the initial amplifier and it will result in some of the oscillator energy making it back to the antenna circuitry. FWIW I built a ton of transmitters and radio gear in my teens, it is pretty easy to take a theoretical stance here and declare that anything that leaks is not designed properly but that's about as 'true Scotsman' as you could get.
Note also with a highly directional high gain receiver that tiny bit of radiating energy is very detectable. It's just going to feed into background noise for most receivers so no one cares. But it will be detectable by a motivated hunter with the right equipment.
To me the most remarkable thing about this story is that the KGB was apparently stymied for an extended period by the fact that Filatov had a "difficult" lock of "foreign origin" on his apartment door, to the extent that they had to steal and copy a key carried by his wife using an elaborate setup. It seems odd that an agency known for its skilled spycraft apparently was unable to pick a door lock.
Well if you watch videos like Lockpicking Lawyer they make it seem like a skilled person can open a typical door in a few seconds. Though he's probably pretty experienced compared to even the average locksmith or spy.
If you learn a lock you can open it quickly when pressed, but most pick-resistant locks are quite troublesome to open. If you can't bump the lock or use a pick gun and the area is not secluded it may not be reasonable to pick the lock.
And I think that's the issue. It was a foreign lock they weren't familiar with so didn't have one to practice on. It was apparently easier to copy the key.
>> When Filatov was at work, the operative workers infiltrated his apartment and installed technical surveillance resources for video surveillance and photography.
1977. Video equipment was VERY different then, especially on that side of the iron curtain. It would have had moving parts, motors, probably requiring a degree of soundproofing. I want to see pictures of where/how they hid this stuff because it wasn't easy.
In parts of china, some uighur households are assigned a live-in spy, an agent openly living with the family to monitor and report on the household's activities.
Perhaps it is lost in translation, but video isn't film. So video surveillance probably means they placed a video camera (probably based on a video tube) and ran cables.
Lol. Kids. Video is certainly not film, but once upon a time was regularly recorded onto magnetic tape running over reels (google "VCR" or "VHS"). Still photography also used moving parts. Things like shutters would make audible clicks when exposing the photographic film, which then had to be moved out of position mechanically. That "click" noise on your iPhone camera is actually designed to mimic this ancient camera technology.
In an ideal situation. In a realworld situation that means running wires through walls, not something done easily in this situation. Hiding a camera in a bookcase is easy. Secretly running wires from that bookcase to a recorder in the next room is not.
They literally kicked his upstairs neighbours out and moved in there themselves. Once you’ve done that, dropping wiring down from your floor to his ceiling become trivial (at least for certain types of building construction).
exactly my thoughts, its like articles about serious "hacks", when the critical steps turn out to be social engineering, definitely interesting, but not what the title suggests.
I agree, but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24520757 is about at least seven dozen people from three of the five eyes on one side, and someone who was infamous for "hacking" Tony Blair and Uscentcom on the other, yet nothing in any of the articles suggests anything much more technical than social engineering[1].
(Indeed, the story as written does have Hollywood MacGuffin floppy disk written all over it, in that I'd find it implausible that, even in a war zone, no one kept anything on-prem, or at least backups? At least performing a "kill -9" via Hellfire missile does upstage Stanford gangstas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fow7iUaKrq4 .)
(Compared to sweden[1], the PLO[2], or even a japanese 財閥[3], either ISIS took a cavalier approach to hooking up their "Cyber Caliphate" or he was not as important as the article, and british tabs, made out.)
Hello everyone. This is a translated excerpt from a desecretized KGB operations manual that offers an example on how their counter-intelligence division caught a spy using a numbers station for one-way communication.
> To compensate this issue a new optic surveillance system “Negus” with 300-400 meter range that was capable of detecting, when objects entered the house, what he did in the stairway and some of the main areas of his apartment.
I've sometimes wondered why the Hershey Fonts have such a nice set of cyrillic vectors. Maybe making things like https://i1.wp.com/www.numbers-stations.com/wp-content/upload... is something one would prefer to do on an in-house plotter, rather than sending it out to an ordinary print shop?
What stands out for me after reading this is the number of civilian lives disrupted to carry out this operation. Whether mass surveillance or moving neighbors, the system successfully rooted out a single mole but paid little mind to the impact that doing so had on the rest of society. Short-sighted strategic excellence can conceal long term self-sabotage and risk.
You can see it on a smaller scale when 2 cops both in their cars are blocking half the road discussing whatever the fuck they discuss. I think government in general has very little regard for mere mortals.
> To intercept the agency letters sent by Filatov or to detect if he has made new places to hide or send documents, a event called “Ruby” was carried out in his work cabinet, his living place and his mailbox by using a special chemical agent.
Do you have any idea what they are talking about here?
I'm imagining dispersing some invisible chemical (or isotope maybe?) in his house and then looking for increases in concetrations in areas where he might have been to.
In SpyCatcher, Peter Wright describes contemplating a similar system to catch spies removing sensitive documents from MI5. From the book:
"I was asked if there was any technical way we could
prove Vassall was removing documents from the Admiralty. I had been experimenting for some time with Frank Morgan on a scheme to mark classified
documents using minute quantities of radioactive material. The idea was to
place a Geiger counter at the entrance of the building where the suspected
spy was operating so that we could detect if any marked documents were
being removed. We tried this with Vassall, but it was not a success. There
were too many exits in the Admiralty for us to be sure we were covering the
one which Vassall used, and the Geiger counter readings were often distorted
by luminous wristwatches and the like. Eventually the scheme was scrapped
when fears about the risks of exposing people to radiation were raised by the
management"
Peter Wright also described a radioactive agent for discovering secret writing, which may be similar to how the secret writing that tipped them off was detected on the letters to the embassy to begin with:
"The techniques of secret writing are the same the world over. First the
spy writes his cover letter. Then he writes the secret message on top, using a
special sheet of carbon paper treated with a colorless chemical. Tiny particles
of the chemical are transferred to the letter, which can then be developed
by the recipient. Most developing agents make the chemical traces grow, so
that the message becomes legible, and unless the correct agent is known, the
message remains undetectable. But Morgan created a universal developing
agent, using radioactivity, which transformed the possibilities of detection."
The answer is that in 2020, when the median page weighs 2 MB and makes 70 requests over a dozen TCP connections, everything is a potential numbers station.
Internet connections are fundamentally different in that they are traceable. You've identified the "station", you can immediately see who's "listening".
Unless you co-opt a page everyone "listens" to, such as facebook or something.
"The core principle of Tor, "onion routing", was developed in the mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, mathematician Paul Syverson, and computer scientists Michael G. Reed and David Goldschlag, with the purpose of protecting U.S. intelligence communications online. Onion routing was further developed by DARPA in 1997." - wiki on Tor
Nothing makes a "tourist" letter any more likely to be spy-related than any other letter going out of the eastern bloc, say a pen-friend letter to Sweden.
Today we're seeing number stations move off of ham radio and onto protocols like MQTT.
Additionally a lot of "weather stations" around the world are simply number stations. They vary the numbers reported, and wherever they diverge from whatever is determined in advance as the "canonical" source is how information is communicated. This paragraph and the above are just my personal observations please note.
Lastly good examples of weather stations in general (not actual spying things please note) can be found here [1] and here [2].
> Today we're seeing number stations move off of ham radio and onto protocols like MQTT.
Wouldn't a MQTT station be lacking one of the major advantages of a radio number station - that it is very difficult to know who is listening to the broadcast.
Using weather reports (or obituaries in newspapers etc) are not number stations, though they can be used as covert channels.
You seem unaware of the difference between unicast IP and broadcast radio. Watching youtube is just as anonymous as a phone call, not very hard to map to a person. Youtube has a log of every IP accessing their servers and what they do, augmented by cookies and google accounts. A radio station does not know who is listening.
You don’t seem to understand my point. With good steganography you don’t know a message is being transmitted in the first place. It doesn’t matter which IP addresses accesses a video because you don’t know which video contains a message. Given the number of videos uploaded to YouTube, checking them all for embedded messages from a sophisticated state actor would seem to be quite a significant challenge. Even more difficult if you’re in Latvia, the agent is Russian, and the video is hosted in the USA...
This approach offers a way of transmitting much more data, on demand, with very little risk of detection of either the existence of the communication channel itself, or of the recipient.
The recipient could casually watch on wifi in a food court, using a modified app, while eating lunch. They would obviously need to exercise good secops, presumably as part of their trade... it seems quite a reasonable approach to me, but I’m no expert, it was just a thought.
