How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience
numbers-stations.com
How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience
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Re: How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience
#2Hello everyone. This is a translated excerpt from a desecretized KGB operations manual that offers an example on how their counter-intelligence division caught a spy using a numbers station for one-way communication.
Re: How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience
#3Today we're seeing number stations move off of ham radio and onto protocols like MQTT.
Additionally a lot of "weather stations" around the world are simply number stations. They vary the numbers reported, and wherever they diverge from whatever is determined in advance as the "canonical" source is how information is communicated. This paragraph and the above are just my personal observations please note.
Lastly good examples of weather stations in general (not actual spying things please note) can be found here [1] and here [2].
Re: How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience
#4Today we're seeing number stations move off of ham radio and onto protocols like MQTT. Additionally a lot of "weather stations" around the world are simply number stations. They vary the numbers reported, and wherever they diverge from whatever is determined in advance as the "canonical" source is how information is communicated. This paragraph and the above are just my personal observations please note. Lastly good…
> Today we're seeing number stations move off of ham radio and onto protocols like MQTT.
Wouldn't a MQTT station be lacking one of the major advantages of a radio number station - that it is very difficult to know who is listening to the broadcast.
Using weather reports (or obituaries in newspapers etc) are not number stations, though they can be used as covert channels.
Re: How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience
#5The way you catch the spy is apparently by monitoring sent mail and comparing handwriting. Very little of this is specific to numbers stations.
Re: How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience
#6The way you catch the spy is apparently by monitoring sent mail and comparing handwriting. Very little of this is specific to numbers stations.
But still a fascinating account, well worth reading.
Re: How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience
#7I've sometimes wondered why the Hershey Fonts have such a nice set of cyrillic vectors. Maybe making things like https://i1.wp.com/www.numbers-stations.com/wp-content/upload... is something one would prefer to do on an in-house plotter, rather than sending it out to an ordinary print shop?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hershey_fonts
Edit: the bus stop has been replaced, and the kerbside tree is gone: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Druzhby+St/@55.7139414,37....
(it was conveniently located between an "embassy row" and a nice park with scenic overlook)
https://www.google.com/maps/@55.709541,37.5422738,3a,75y,90t...
Re: How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience
#8So, basically the answer is "expensively monitor all outgoing international mail and hope for someone as stupid as to sign his spy letters".
Re: How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience
#9So, basically the answer is "expensively monitor all outgoing international mail and hope for someone as stupid as to sign his spy letters".
In 1970s USSR there wasn't much outgoing international mail, so the monitoring wasn't really that expensive.
Re: How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience
#10So, basically the answer is "expensively monitor all outgoing international mail and hope for someone as stupid as to sign his spy letters".
The answer is that in 2020, when the median page weighs 2 MB and makes 70 requests over a dozen TCP connections, everything is a potential numbers station.
I had been joking about www.duckdascism.gov in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24458630 but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24526075 has people who've used that channel. (for the record, ~64kbps is more than most people had over dialup in the early days of the web)