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Barely an hour after a news organization published an article about a Top Secret National Security Agency document on Russian hacking, the Justice Department announced charges against a 25-year-old government contractor who a senior federal official says was the leaker of the document.
The May 5, 2017 intelligence document published by The Intercept, an online news organization, describes new details about Russian efforts to hack voting systems in the U.S a week prior to the 2016 presidential election. While the document doesn't say the hacking changed any votes, it "raises the possibility that Russian hacking may have breached at least some elements of the voting system, with disconcertingly uncertain results."
Even as the document was ricocheting around Washington, the Justice Department announced that a criminal complaint was filed in the Southern District of Georgia charging Reality Leigh Winner, 25, a federal contractor, with removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet.
Source: NBC News
Once investigative efforts identified Winner as a suspect, the FBI obtained and executed a search warrant at her residence. According to the complaint, Winner agreed to talk with agents during the execution of the warrant. During that conversation, Winner admitted intentionally identifying and printing the classified intelligence reporting at issue despite not having a "need to know," and with knowledge that the intelligence reporting was classified. Winner further admitted removing the classified intelligence reporting from her office space, retaining it, and mailing it from Augusta, Georgia, to the news outlet, which she knew was not authorized to receive or possess the documents.
Source: Department of Justice
While the document provides a rare window into the NSA's understanding of the mechanics of Russian hacking, it does not show the underlying "raw" intelligence on which the analysis is based. A U.S. intelligence officer who declined to be identified cautioned against drawing too big a conclusion from the document because a single analysis is not necessarily definitive.
Source: The Intercept
How The Intercept Outed Reality Winner
Julian Assange: Alleged NSA leaker 'must be supported'
Bad tradecraft: How the Intercept may have outed its own leaker
WikiLeaks tweet #1: "Suspected Intercept reporter gave US government NSA whistleblower Reality Leigh Winner's post code, printout and her report number" and tweet #2: "WikiLeaks issues a US$10,000 reward for information leading to the public exposure & termination of this 'reporter'".
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Wednesday June 07 2017, @05:17PM (4 children)
EFF's list is outdated.
I use an OKI MC562w printer for office work, and it seems to use forensic markers as well. It ruins print jobs where you run a sheet through several times--the color builds up with each successive print until it is visible.
We also have a Kyocera TASKalfa 3550ci multifunction for public use, and it also displays dots, though not as obtrusive as the OKI's.
--
This was an accidental discovery--after a series of fortuitous mistakes while designing some brochures, I found that if you run the same sheet through the printer multiple times, the small variations in sheet feed causes the color in the security markings to be deposited unevenly making it larger and more visible. In the OKI, they show up as a kind of smoky schmutz after 4-5 prints, while on the Kyocera, it takes 6-10 prints and you see distinct yellow dots.
Interestingly, the EFF doesn't seem to have used this method of detection, though, as users don't generally do multiple prints on the same surface, it may not have occurred to them.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday June 07 2017, @06:14PM (3 children)
Just a little counter hint.. The image on a page is built up using a bitstream that is scanned onto the drum inside the laser. Now if that laser on/off controlled by a bitstream were to come from somewhere else then, viola the whole design is circumvented ;)
I think the bitrate is in the 4.6 Mbit/s ballpark.
For A4 with 600 dpi printing 8 pages per minute in B/W:
inch = 0.025400
(0.210*(600/inch) * .297*(600/inch)) / (60/8) = 4.6e6 bit/s
For 1200 dpi:
(0.210*(1200/inch) * .297*(1200/inch)) / (60/8) = 19e6 bit/s
Needs a serious serdes unit however. Way faster than standard I2S ports.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @05:36AM
"then, viola"
Either you mean "voila" [wiktionary.org], or you're 3d-printing violin-like string instruments [wikipedia.org] :)
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Thursday June 08 2017, @11:31PM (1 child)
That makes a lot of sense.
I'm not sure how I would fix it though, given my crap electronics skills. (If it was carpentry, no problem).
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 09 2017, @05:58AM
You could write a bit-bang program for say a Raspberry-Pi using two of the GPIO outputs. The first GPIO takes input from the laser scanner module and triggers your code to send. The second GPIO will output a string of bits synchronously until one line is complete. The rest is just setup and repetition. To get rid of jitter all interrupts and multitasking has to be shut of when running the code.
The advantage is that you may get away with just wiring the laser scanner module to some GPIO pins. At worst you will have 36 clock cycles per bit to output. A 900 MHz RPi with 600 dpi would have a margin of 195 clock cycles per bit. Plenty of CPU cycles to go around. There should also be some opto-switch or similar to trigger start of a new page. This could also wack all "driver incompatibility" stuff.