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Russian spies. Ad-hoc networks.

Jul 1, 2010
Uncategorized

I’ve been following the recent news story about the russian spy ring that was busted in the US. In particular, I found this blog has some fascinating info on how they were allegedly operating. The bit about a truck pulling up with an ad-hoc wireless network for the spy to connect to intrigued me. It seems like an obvious thing to do reading about it, but it made me realize, I don’t think I’ve ever actually used ad-hoc networking (for spy related activities or otherwise).

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2 Comments

  1. Alex Bennee  •  Jul 2, 2010 @06:43

    I’m surprised they were this elaborate. Would a TOR with an anonymous re-mailer and GPG drawn too much attention? The article mentions decrypted communication which either means the NSA really can crack anything or they were using poor crypto.

    Passing your secure laptop to an unknown contact to fix is also a tradecraft fail.

  2. AdamW  •  Jul 3, 2010 @22:54

    Ad-hoc networking is actually built right into NetworkManager: if you have a wireless interface, and an internet connection available through some interface which is *not* that wireless interface, you can left click on NM and ‘Create new wireless network…’, which will give you a very simple wizard to set up an ad hoc network which will share that internet connection. Can be pretty handy in some circumstances.

    This is also commonly how ‘wireless router’ apps for cellphones work – they set up an ad hoc network. I do that all the time.



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