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How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Stingray to Find Him

politico.com

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Re: How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Stingray to Find Him

#111

Post by User23 »

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #101
thomastjeffery wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it leads to all kinds of practical problems, figuring out which is probably best left as an exercise for the reader. Any examples? I honestly don't see any problems here.

That is a Huuuge number of IP's, at a very high request rate, required for every new connection. It is orders of magnitude greater than DNS, and would be expected to have much lower latency. Throw onto that the trust issue - such IP certificate repositories are very quickly able to determine who is communicating with each other, and at what time. Whilst this is currently possible anyway, current methods are less cent…

640k is all the memory you'll ever need.

Re: How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Stingray to Find Him

#112

Post by guitarbill »

cantrevealname wrote: post #66

The hacker was exposed because of poor OPSEC (due to tracking of his IP address). > Rigmaiden had received boxes and boxes of criminal discovery that would help him understand how the government planned to prosecute its case. In the penultimate box, he saw the word “stingray” in a set of notes. The authorities were exposed because of poor OPSEC as well. They weren't supposed to ever mention “stingray”.

agreed, for somebody who seems intelligent and driven, seems like it would have been beneficial to put more effort in upfront. but then hindsight is 20/20, and it seems like to be good at OpSec is has to be your job (i.e. providing money so you can solely focus on it), or you have to be truly paranoid.

Re: How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Stingray to Find Him

#113

Post by zxcmx »

c22 wrote: post #99
w8rbt wrote: post #38

Stingrays were being used as early as the 1990s by federal law enforcement. They were used to help locate Kevin Mitnick in North Carolina. Edit - I recall reading that years ago in Tsutomu Shimomura's book 'Takedown' (published in 1996). Outside of this, I have no other reference. It's a good read BTW. https://www.amazon.com/Takedown-Pursuit-Capture-Americas-Com...

I seem to have gotten rid of my copy of Takedown , but Jonathan Littman writes in The Fugitive Game , paraphrasing John Markoff: "...Shimomura was sitting in the passenger seat of a Raleigh Sprint technician's car, holding a cellular-frequency direction-finding antenna, and watching a 'signal-strength meter display its reading on a laptop computer screen.'" This sounds, perhaps, functionally equivalent to a modern st…

Actually, the software to do this kind of thing was actually what Mitnick was after!

It would be laughably easy by today’s standards. Cloning AMPs phones (with ESN/MIN from “trashing” and bootleg Motorola service software) was within the reach of bored teenagers, but the elusive “vampire phone” required decoding the control channel. This was “hard” at the time.

It could be done with the right service equipment or say, suitably hacked firmware for something like an OKI 900...

No stingray required, you could indeed do everything passively. Very different times. Today you could probably do it all by dragging a few blocks around in gnu radio’s grc tool.

Re: How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Stingray to Find Him

#114

Post by cornholio »

ggm wrote: post #18
panarky wrote: post #6

The salient bit: Police found him by tracking his Internet Protocol (IP) address online first, and then taking it to Verizon Wireless, the Internet service provider connected with the account. Verizon provided records that showed that the AirCard associated with the IP address was transmitting through certain cell towers in certain parts of Santa Clara. Likely by using a stingray, the police found the exact block of…

Lest anyone believe their positional privacy is at risk, even the Verizon routing prefix could have homed the cops onto which provider to drill down into. The take-away here, is that end-to-end protocols by neccessity as currently written send the src IP in the packet. If we'd designed IP to send the src IP as a payload, and had encrypted payload (TLS style) and then only had the destination IP in the outer packet, t…

Despite the gargantuan effort, you wouldn't actually gain substantial privacy from such a move. True, a single packet wouldn't identify both parties, but an exchange of packets in rapid succession, a TCP handshake or even an UDP stream would immediately leak the same information to any interested hop in the network.

Furthermore, eavesdropping for metadata on the line is one of the lesser privacy concerns for most people. What really matters are privacy violations by the providers higher up the stack, where the address of both endpoints must be known to enable communication.

Re: How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Stingray to Find Him

#115

Post by ikiris »

hueving wrote: post #107
ggm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lest anyone believe their positional privacy is at risk, even the Verizon routing prefix could have homed the cops onto which provider to drill down into. The take-away here, is that end-to-end protocols by neccessity as currently written send the src IP in the packet. If we'd designed IP to send the src IP as a payload, and had encrypted payload (TLS style) and then only had the destination IP in the outer packet, t…

Putting the return IP encrypted in the payload breaks NAT (see FTP helpers). You do understand that the IP that the return traffic is destined for has to initially be addressed to the IP of the NAT device, not what the client thinks its IP is, right?

And nothing of value was lost :)

Re: How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Stingray to Find Him

#116

Post by eboyjr »

xyzzyz wrote: post #19
ggm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lest anyone believe their positional privacy is at risk, even the Verizon routing prefix could have homed the cops onto which provider to drill down into. The take-away here, is that end-to-end protocols by neccessity as currently written send the src IP in the packet. If we'd designed IP to send the src IP as a payload, and had encrypted payload (TLS style) and then only had the destination IP in the outer packet, t…

If the source IP is encrypted, the recipient needs to decrypt it first in order to be able to send a response. To decrypt it, it needs to either have some shared secret with the sender, or the sender needs to use the recipient's private key. The parties cannot obtain the shared secret the usual way, the Diffie-Helman exchange. It cannot be performed, because it requires back-and-forth communication, which we are tryi…

Just a half-baked idea: If you don't want to make a new request for every connection, and the recipient owns a huge block of IPv6 addresses, the recipient can create an asynchronous key pair where the public key is used as the IPv6 suffix. The United States Department of Defense owns /13. This provides 115 bits of public key information. The sender can use the IPv6 address as the public key.

Re: How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Stingray to Find Him

#117

Post by Matt3o12_ »

Something doesn’t seem to add up. First of all the story fails to mention that those devices do not only track the target, they track and record all phones in its range, which is a massive breach of privacy and the real issue with those devices.

Furthermore, they allegedly already had his ip, so why bother with a stingray? They could simply tell his cell carrier to provide them with all his location data (as well as further dates).

It seems to me that they went fishing with their stingrays because they didn’t in fact know his real IP address and only knew from a source or other mistakes his approximate whereabouts.

It wouldn’t surprise me if they only had his VPN’s IP and were just looking for everybody connecting to the VPN in the stingray range and this is how they found him.

Re: How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Stingray to Find Him

#118

Post by LoSboccacc »

panarky wrote: post #6

The salient bit: Police found him by tracking his Internet Protocol (IP) address online first, and then taking it to Verizon Wireless, the Internet service provider connected with the account. Verizon provided records that showed that the AirCard associated with the IP address was transmitting through certain cell towers in certain parts of Santa Clara. Likely by using a stingray, the police found the exact block of…

> Likely by using a stingray

Article title: “proved”

Re: How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Stingray to Find Him

#119

Post by akvadrako »

nindalf wrote: post #105
sulam wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was filing fake tax returns. That probably exposed his IP in logs on government servers.

What on earth? Isn't using a VPN the bare minimum when you're doing something potentially illegal?

Maybe he did. Unless he's careful in picking his VPN provider they probably have some level of cooperation with the FBI.

Re: How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Stingray to Find Him

#120

Post by falsedan »

Matt3o12_ wrote: post #117

Something doesn’t seem to add up. First of all the story fails to mention that those devices do not only track the target, they track and record all phones in its range, which is a massive breach of privacy and the real issue with those devices. Furthermore, they allegedly already had his ip, so why bother with a stingray? They could simply tell his cell carrier to provide them with all his location data (as well as…

> Furthermore, they allegedly already had his ip, so why bother with a stingray? They could simply tell his cell carrier to provide them with all his location data

Remember that getting subscriber data/metadata from ISPs requires a warrant, and that a single tower location could cover a 6-12 sq. km. area (plenty of space to hide in)

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