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If you distribute encrypted materials you also need to distribute a means of decryption. I’m willing to bet a honeypot was used to trick him into distributing his csam right to the government hinself.
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Hey, could I get some info on the
Full running browser in his SIM card
Thing?
I’m quite curious and haven’t been able of finding anything on the internet about it
Neither Tor nor end-to-end encrypted messengers will cover the endpoints. It’s possible that they caught him using good old fashioned detective work. You don’t need a software back door for that.
Tor was created by NSA, half of Tor servers are run by NSA, not that secure
Tor was created by the NRL, which is a part of the US Navy and Marine Corps.
Meh, I heard wrong them sorry
Tor was created by the Naval Research Labs, and was released to the public because it is secure.
The problem is that if it’s only the CIA or DIA using it, it’s easy figure out who is using it and where. Make it global and now there is a lot of noise to separate out.
Yeah, the security of tor relies on the nodes being different, but when most of them are owned by the same person/government body the security go downhill, sadly i2p isn’t that popular, because every person is a node
Well it probably wasn’t a Vic Mackey-style rubber hose attack, because it sounds like this chump is getting hauled into court.
Please don’t talk about child predators, and use the term “back door” in the same sentence. It ain’t right…
we’re talking about encryption here, not…that. please get your mind out of the gutter
He didn’t use encrypted everything. He had a public telegram group chat in which he stored a lot of his material. Which, as many people in the comments on the article pointed out, is not encrypted, but is presented by telegram as if it is. That’s likely how they caught him.
To be clear, it’s encrypted*.
* If you enable it
Recent events have taught me that only individual chats are encrypted*. Group chats don’t have that feature.
In telegram nothing is e2e encrypted unless you specifically ask it to be and when you do, it kills all the functionality that makes it better than others.
That’s what I said. The person I replied to said that all messages are encrypted* with the asterisk being only if you specifically enable it. I clarified that it doesn’t apply to group chats though. I don’t use Telegram so the loss of functionality is actually a bigger deal to me than the argument around E2EE. Can you explain what features are lost when you enable it? It’s a messaging app so I’m curious what you sacrifice for E2EE.
Telegram groups are not E2E.
Chats are encrypted, but the servers hold the encryption keys (I believe).
There are one-to-one chats that are full e2e, but you have to enable it. And it has all sorts of compromises.
Qualifier: this is as dicumented by telegram. Since it’s not open source, we can’t really verify it
There is no point in encrypting a public group chat since anyone can join and decrypt it anyway.
The secret chats feature isn’t between anyone I believe, it’s between two people. But I don’t actually know for certain because I’ve not looked into it beyond a cursory googling.
That said, you’d be correct in that just like any service out there, the moment you let random people join there’s no level of encryption that can keep your secrets secret.
It works well in Matrix, and you can restrict who joins on that platform.
If you restrict it, then it isn’t public. I’m not saying that encrypted group chats are useless. But if it is public and anyone can join anyway, then encryption adds no secrecy.
Right, I’m just saying that other platforms give you the option of E2EE group chats, which makes sense if you know your group will remain fixed to a certain size. For truly public groups, yeah, encryption just adds a lot of processing overhead without much benefit.
I, personally, would prefer a platform that gives me the option rather than doesn’t.
AFAIK chat contents are stored unencrypted on the server.
They got it by running a honeypot exit node like they always do
my guess is that a large number of tor exit nodes is run by government agencies.
Certainly some are. How many is an entertaining question.
.onions: am i a joke to you?
It’s better they don’t disclose it and catch more people doing the same.
I’m all for transparency but if that means less caught child molesters, I’m ok with a little obfuscation, even from the fucking pigs.
This whole thing is horrifying, but the last paragraph is especially disturbing:
Since Herrera himself has a young daughter, and since there are “six children living within his fourplex alone” on Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, the government has asked a judge not to release Herrera on bail before his trial.
Even more disturbing is it said he was also producing content.
Where is the police brutality when you need it?!
As satisfying as it may seem we can’t do this. No group no matter how heinous should be abused by the police. Don’t give the pigs an inch.
Let him be convicted then see what gen pop has to say about it.
Does this go to show that authorities needing backdoors to everything in order to do their jobs is actually kind of nonsense?
The article is exaggerating the guy’s setup way too much. Opsec doesn’t end at the application level… The OS (the most popular being in bed with US), ISP, tor nodes, Honeypot VPNs, so on and so on could leave a trail.
Using telegram public groups and obfuscating a calculator as a password protection layer is hillbilly level of security.
And i’m glad these fuckos don’t have the knowledge to go beyond App developers marketing.
Goes beyond the OSI model, too. Someone has to pay for that VPN, and there has to be an entry point to getting BTC, using a 2nd hand laptop where they can prove you bought it off of someone off of Craigslist, etc.
Mullvad let’s you write down an account number on a piece of paper and mail it in with cash and they’ll activate it.
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Yup, every time I read about something like this, I look at what I’m doing and it’s way overkill, and I have nothing to hide. I’m guessing there are plenty of sickos that don’t get caught because they practice half-decent opsec, but there are a ton that don’t.
Yeah, it does. Perfect opsec is impossible even with encryption.
Heard about a guy doing insane opsec when selling on the dark web (darknet diaries podcast).
In the end he got busted because a trusted member if his operation got lazy and ignored his rulesEdit: This guy was essentially
Leeching internet via a directional antenna from a neighbour that was significantly away
Not allowing any visitor in with a cell. You had to keep it outside
All drug related actions are done in a cleaned down room.
Tripple sealing dark marketplace orders, wiping everything down with corrosive fluids to destroy any sort of dna material
Not going to the same post office in (I believe 6 months) and only sending of 3-6 shipments at onceI hope I got it correctly. Please go listen to the episode: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/132/
Reminds me of the lulzsec leader dude who exposed himself by logging into IRC once without tor on.
Then he folded instantly and became an informant for the FBI to stay out of jail lol.
In the end its really about tradeoffs. You can’t be an expert in everything so you need a team if you want to do anything big, but Cyber criminals are still criminals. They don’t trust each other which is what ultimately leads to their downfall even if they do all the implementation and tech part right.
Some German guy got got for logging into IRC via encrypted wifi, the cops did some war driving and correlated timing of traffic spikes with IRC messages until they had a profile with better hit probability than a DNA match.
The best thing about that? They didn’t even need a search warrant as our genius was broadcasting the side-channel to the whole neighbourhood.
Sounds interesting, got any links for further reading on that?
I can’t quite connect the dots between wifi/internet traffic spikes when IRC is so light on traffic that it’s basically background noise and war driving.
When you send a message, that usually fits into an IP packet. That gets completely encrypted by the wifi, but you know that a data packet approximately that size has been sent at exactly that time. Simultaneously, you watch the IRC channel and see when messages are arriving from your suspect, or someone else types a message and that should correlate with another encrypted wifi package.
The mistake was a) using wifi, exposing the data in the first place and b) not torrenting while you’re chatting. That would’ve obscured the time correlations.
Laymen with no understanding here. Obviously there were other mistakes, all of which make sense to me on a rudimentary level, but the first mistake you listed was him using wifi? What is the more secure alternative? Or do you just mean sending data directly over a true wifi connection and not using TOR or another medium?
I have an understanding of the underlying concepts. I’m mostly interested in the war driving. War driving, at least in my understanding, implies that someone, a state agency in this case, physically went to the very specific location of the suspect, penetrated their (wireless) network and therefore executed a successful traffic correlation attack.
I’m interested in how they got their suspects narrowed down that drastically in the first place. Traffic correlation attacks, at least in my experience, usually happen in a WAN context, not LAN, for example with the help of ISPs.
Timing attacks work, but if they’re running those then they have a pretty good idea as to both sides of the convo.
Put another way, if they’ve got to that point your opsec has already failed.
Well without that they would’ve needed probably months correlating things like “goes to bed at X o clock” with those chat logs. For a whole neighbourhood to then get a search warrant with that. Which of course is not above the capabilities of a state actor but depending on how big a fish he was they might not have bothered spending the resources. Being able to pin-point a house in maybe a day when all you have is a municipality is a whole different ballpark.
krasse sache
He got his first kid IIRC and was sleep deprived.
That’s sounds mostly correct.
His relative also admitted their involvement and flipped on him which destroyed the narrow avenue he had to throw out the original evidence for the warrant.
Of course we only ever hear the cases of people who get caught. If he relative hadn’t gotten lazy he may never have been caught.
The lesson there is not to involve other people.
The Ars article seems to suggest that they were able to crack his phones pretty easily, which is a bit scary. I don’t see anything about a computer.
Although it doesn’t appear he was actually using any encryption apps to store material; rather, he used a fake calculator app as password protection. Obviously not the brightest bulb in the drawer.
The material was allegedly stored behind password protection on his phone(s) but also on Mega and on Telegram, where Herrera is said to have “created his own public Telegram group to store his CSAM.” He also joined “multiple CSAM-related Enigma groups” and frequented dark websites with taglines like “The Only Child Porn Site you need!”
My guess would honestly be Telegram. For starters, they aren’t end-to-end encrypted by default, you have to turn it on. The only end-to-end encryption that Telegram offers is their “secret chats” which are only available between two users. Groups are not encrypted.
So telegram’s delusional propaganda did something good for once?
What propaganda?
That groups aren’t encrypted is documented. If you don’t know that, it’s because you didn’t bother to see how it works.
The Ars article seems to suggest that they were able to crack his phones pretty easily
Android uses data at rest encryption, which isn’t really useful without a lockscreen PIN/password since data gets decrypted after you unlock your screen the first time after each boot
Although it doesn’t appear he was actually using any encryption apps to store material; rather, he used a fake calculator app as password protection. Obviously not the brightest bulb in the drawer.
Agreed, he probably felt safe enough “hiding” the files. Definitely not the sharpest tool in the shed, which is great because fuck this guy
I honestly don’t think he really had any opsec apart from those few applications, look at what tools he was using, what a joke. Fake calculator app to store files are great to protect from your parents, not the FBI.
He was clearly using Android and I bet he was using the stock rom, kyc sim card, and not even a vpn behind tor.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy and relieved he was caught, but if he had done serious research and did a better opsec, it wouldn’t have been so easy for the authorities to get him
actually using a vpn with tor is not a good idea: https://support.torproject.org/faq/faq-5/
true but only if you do : tor > vpn
if you do : vpn > tor in this order, it’s way more resistant, because if the onion node is compromised, it’s the vpn’s ip address that is exposed, not yours
oh wow i didn’t know that!! thanx for clarifying :]
Phones are horseshit for OPSec, always. Every darknet admin and their dog know that.
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It seems irrelevant whether this person is using encrypted channels if they failed to maintain anonymity. If they distributed material and leaked any identifying info (e.g. IP address), then it would be trivial for investigators or CIs to track them down.
Likely, data may have been encrypted but he may have leaked compromising metadata. Even more likely it was bad operation security linking a personal identity to his anonymous persona.
I’m always thankful for incompetent criminals.
Thankfully it seems pretty unrealistic that someone addicted to CSAM would maintain perfect OpSec over a lifetime of abuse.
In the list of apps he was using I don’t see any mention of a VPN. How much you want to bet he raw dogged it with encrypted apps over the clearnet so it was trivial to leak his real IP address
He posted the AI filth to a “public server”, so I’m willing to bet his plan was just full of holes. I don’t mind pedos getting taken down, buy I do mind encrypted software being owned by the government - any government.
It sounds like he created material, not only AI but actual children then distributed it. The tools to track down the creators of CASM is only getting better.
A single legal image of any of those children posted to social media is going to allow algorithms to make the match and its routine detective work from there.
It only takes one child to talk. No amount of encryption is going to stop that.
i watched some documatnary about hackers, and usually, they catch them because they talk way to mouch about themselves.
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thanks!
This dude wasn’t a hacker by any stretch
But when you do anything illegal like this, you need to act like one.
i believe thats a given…
Prison is too good for anyone who keeps child sex abuse images.
WHO is downvoting you???
People like me, who are against the death penalty on principle. (or even more “creative” forms of punishment people like to come up with in these cases).
No, prison is where this guy belongs. For as long as necessary.Further to this its not likely to result in less children being abused.
If you have the death penalty for even possessing CSAM as the parent suggests, then there is no incentive to not get into distribution or even actively abusing children and producing CSAM once you posess some. The punishment isnt any worse so why not? Its the same reason for proportionality in other crimes, we dont punish robbing a bank with life in jail as then there would be no reason for anyone who robs a bank to not just murder everyone to leave no witnessess.
And if you propose the death penalty for abusing children, a child abuser has incentive to kill the child afterwards to get rid of the witness.
The punishment can’t get any worse, and it reduces the chance of getting caught.
Oh, I was thinking something far worst than death. I was thinking something like a torture rack.
So you’re a sadist, but you try to convince yourself it’s okay because you only want to torture people you think deserve it. Of course, no one deserves to be tortured.
That’s what I meant by more creative forms of punishment.
Death penalty is fine if it didn’t get abused bit it will be abused. We know this. So yes i agree with you.
But also if cop killed him and there is adequate evidence that athat person actually hurt a child. I just see self defense and if I was no a jury, I would not convict and I hate police lol
Society lost this basic function for self cleansing. At some point these people just need to be disposed off.
Also, state will execute for treason. I look at severe child abuse as a higher order, ie social treason. FAFO
Maybe you should research a bit on how child abusers are treated in prison.
Lots of conjecture in the comments about how he got caught. Too bad nobody read the article.
Web-based generative AI tools/chatbots
…
he created fake AI CSAM—but using imagery of real kids.
All the privacy apps in the world won’t save you if you’re uploading pics to a cloud service.
saw a headline the other day about the gov’t tracking people on tor using Google ads
I’m still not entirely convinced that tor is as protected as people think it is.
There’s only something like 6,000 exit nodes. It really wouldn’t be that much money for the government to run thousands of them. If you monitor enough exit nodes and enough relays, you can start to statistically tie connections back together with timing analysis.
I don’t know this to be the case for sure but I can’t imagine the government hasn’t pushed towards breaking the security and identifiability of the tor network
If you read a lot of news, it’s really clear Tor isn’t protecting anyone from the FBI. It’s about as effective as using limewire at this point. Which also, the reporting makes it pretty clear it’s not effective to hide criminal acts in the least. But it’s pretty great abusers think it’s effective so they get caught.
I’ve suspected Tor of being heavily compromised for a while now. It’s already known that many onion sites are government honeypots, with sites being taken over rather frequently, sometimes without triggering the canary. While it’s better than nothing in some situations, I don’t think it can be relied upon for true anonymity anymore.
I2P has more protection against this kind of analysis.
It’s not as protected as people think it is. This has popped up on headlines for years. It helps, but if someone really wants to find you on there, they can. It’s just not as easy.
Can you share the source
It is also because of people like him that laws like Going Dark become plausible to the eyes of the politicians and the masses
the fool! you can’t use ROT-104 encryption against 4 cores!
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Counterpoint: Those who produce and collect CP deserve to be in jail
I mean, you are right, but I don’t buy that the solution is mass government surveillance.
That’s the funny thing. This guy got busted through plain old detective work.
Did you read the article? Mass surveillance had nothing to do with this.
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Are you ok?
Damn, thats weird. Are you mentally ill or st?
Well, this person (according to their post history) has schizophrenia, but this could kinda be real and probably also happned, if not recently, probably sometime in history. Of course the stereotype about rape victims actually exists.
The replies to your comment glow so bright
a heavy vehicle driver for the US military
That’s an odd way to describe a soldier. It’s not really surprising when violent people do violent things.
I’m not sure that’s necessarily true. There are plenty of military contractors out there, and a driver is the kind of position you would expect to be likely contracted out. That in no way makes one a soldier.
Plenty of contracting orgs do driving for the military. You don’t need a soldier, you need a trucker, so why use soldiers?
Lol, I still don’t know why people like CSAM :v
