By the wanting glass: The web has seen its justifiable share of bizarre, however a Star Wars fan website secretly run by the CIA to speak with abroad spies may prime the listing. StarWarsWeb.internet appeared like every other 2010-era fan web page, full with lightsabers, Yoda quotes (“Like these video games you’ll”), LEGO advertisements, and hyped-up mentions of video games like Battlefront 2 and The Drive Unleashed II. However behind that nostalgic facade was a covert login system. If you happen to entered the best password into the search bar, you’d unlock a safe line to CIA handlers. Or no less than, 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, internet dev know-how, and apparently infinite endurance, 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 keeping 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 website was discovered, figuring out others was usually only a matter of primary detective work. This was one thing Iranian and Chinese language counterintelligence groups apparently found out over a decade in the past. You’ll be able to 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 look at the location.
All mentioned, 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.
