US: Alaska man busted with 10,000+ child sex abuse images despite his many encrypted apps
2 years ago by some_guy to c/technology
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.
Tor was created by the NRL, which is a part of the US Navy and Marine Corps.
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
Please don't talk about child predators, and use the term "back door" in the same sentence. It ain't right....
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.
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
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.
AFAIK chat contents are stored unencrypted on the server.
.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.
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.
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.
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.
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 rules
Edit: 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 once
I 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.
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.
Just exterminate all statists within 52'000 km and donezo
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
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.
thanks!
But when you do anything illegal like this, you need to act like one.
i believe thats a given....
All this is obvious.
Since nobody pressures Signal and Wire in Europe, it really seems to me that the pressure is mostly applied to those who do have the ability to spy upon their users.
That would be too optimistic about humanity, but maybe not. What if.
Recently? Maybe i'm wrong, but i remember a 2 years old news telling that france was pursuing allowing the police to spy on rioter's phones.... I remember it was not long after the "end" of the yellow jacket's riots, so maybe it's even older.
Dysthopic vibes.
Telegram is not safe from governments. Maybe safe from Western ones.
It does not have E2EE for most things. Which means TG users are not safe from TG owners, and TG owners are not safe from those who are the force behind them.
Maybe it's Israel, maybe it's Russia, Durov's female friend was spotted in Baku in a "cyber-security" center operated by Israelis, so maybe Azerbaijan. Maybe I don't know.
You don't have to know which exactly force that is. All you have to know is how TG works.
people who organize demonstrations
... can use Signal. Its usability has improved a lot since I last tried using it. I've just moved half of our family chats there, another half is waiting till a bit later, because they are on another continent. It's as convenient as WhatsApp.
I assume he was arrested because he is a russian asset.
Regardless, he was doing business in France and not following its laws. So the official reason still makes more sense than your fantasies.
Yes, companies should comply with law enforcement when their platform is evidently used for crimes.
It's because he kept letting terrorists and child molesters get away with their crimes.
Governments would continually go to him and ask for help to save people's lives and he told them to fuck off.
He's right where he's supposed to be now.
its way more likely that your mom searched for cancer related information on google. and you are connected to your mom, so you get ads as well.
I get the feeling this thing, I mean, the ad targeting is far stronger in the USA (maybe also in europe) than in the rest of the world. My "ad targeting" is idiotic. I once was in brazil (argentinian here!). And got ads in portuguese for a year or so. I was a month planning on buying a computer, with all that that involves (google searchs, looking for prices on internet) and i never got an ad until i actually bought everything, then it was 2 months of ads recommending me to buy the exact same components i already bought.
As today, half of my ads are in german. Jokes on them, i use them to learn.
I dont mean to be snide, but the abbreviation for advertisement is 'ad', not add.
Also, using uBlock Origin on Firefox (or its various forks) gets you rid of ads pretty much universally. It's also a security feature in the post-2000's internet; lots of malware use ads as an attack vector.
You should not need to suffer through ads - no one should.
europe has more complicated laws about privacy and data mining
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.
The inciting thought of most criminal acts is ''they'll never catch me''. Which if you're as lucky as me, you'll know you'll get caught everytime, and they'll make an example of you. It's kept my nose clean a long time.
Shhh I want an excuse to not protect my privacy, it's hard
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.
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
sure
www.cnet.com/news/privacy/nsa-tracks-google-ads-to-find-tor-users/
Thanks for pointing out, but how have things changed since then?
Prison is too good for anyone who keeps child sex abuse images.
So what do you recommend, Siberia?
That’s a good idea.
Maybe you should research a bit on how child abusers are treated in prison.
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.
It's all publicly approved backdoors until feds are planting child abuse imagery on your PC because you spoke out against them in the wring venue. No one will believe you when they do. Currently you can't trust articles like this, maybe the dude was actually hurting kids. Maybe the feds just needed a win. You won't ever know, and neither will I so long as the same ideology is in control. Now watch them turn every single kid in the pics into a sex offender because the fed believes if you were raped, you WILL rape someone in the future. But by all means keep enjoying their rage bait.
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.
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.
Milf porn is where it's at. Speaking of which, I think I'm going to go find a cory chase video
Catholic church sure... But look at any religion.
I mean, you are right, but I don't buy that the solution is mass government surveillance.
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