A man with the initials O.K - that of his real name; he is operating under a pseudonym I know too, in one of four countries directly or almost-directly involved in the Ukraine war - will not be having an OK weekend. His door and reason to live will be bashed in this evening by a very specialized police team. Maybe his face too.
Why? Because people are the weak spot when you're busy with slimy things that cost soldiers defending their country their lives.
His girlfriend got her computer hacked by a pro-Ukrainian hacker collective this week. (No, I didn't say they are in Ukraine, or Ukrainians themselves.)
The very ordinary looking guy that doesn't touch alcohol ran the Tails OS on a USB drive from her computer in a high apartment building, to send military data to the FSB in Russia via onion routing. He cleverly connected using a directional antenna aimed at a public WiFi hotspot some kilometers away that he hacked into.
The undercover agent was clever enough not to pay for internet, but such public hotspots have hackers snooping on users all the time, even though most traffic is encrypted nowadays. (It is possible that his handler had the hotspot hacked on his behalf by another undercover dirtbag, since the subject in this story made some very elementary mistakes. Also, you should always use at least a VPN.)
When the collective - the good guys - picked up the 'unusual' operating system on Wireshark logs a week or three ago, red flags went up. Who is this guy, any curious hacker would ask himself. Maybe he likes to play games, we must check. (Say the last sentence in a thick Ukrainian accent. Lol.)
And so the snooping got stepped up, and another member actually went war driving (the hacker term for intercepting internet traffic) using a bicycle of all things to pinpoint the origin, by measuring signal strength, amongst others. A backpack can conceal some eye-stretching equipment. (Okay, fine, a laptop and something else, but still.)
In the process to locate the origin, some dirty gray hat techniques were deployed, as one radio station noticed when its interfering signal temporarily disappeared, and CCTV camera systems at several shops gotten breached. All is fair in love and war.
Every spy is trained to connect for as short as possible, send a message and GTFO, but our not-a-hero spent several hours at a time connected. That's a major mistake in most cases when you're a spy. Interestingly enough, as a side note, the devs at Tor recommend the opposite, that ordinary users of the browser stay connected for several hours, in order to 'confuse timestamps' (my quotes, too lazy to explain.)
While the superb operating system Tails (it can be run only live, i.e from a flash drive, and routes all traffic through Tor, and doesn't touch the hard drive of a computer) is suppose to leave no traces, the Russian spy - while he's not a Russian citizen himself - stored certain data on the computer itself, including two passwords on there, 'hiding' it in a text file that he named by added a dot in front. No ordinary computer user will then spot the file, especially when it is stashed among the thousands of OS' files. But when you're a hacker from a collective intent on sniffing out security threats, it's good practice to run a Bash script to look for files that's not supposed to be in operating system folders.
And so, after the apartment of the hottie with the Botox lips - they're like deployed facial airbags - was located, her computer was hacked and a RAT (remote access tool on kernel level) planted. That's what you get when you use Windows. Then the ROM was breached and data sent out to the collective's servers. That was enough to out the undercover operative.
As devil's advocate, I always look at the other side too, the motivation of why someone did something vile. In this case, one of the spy's parents was on board an Iranian Boeing passenger jet that got shot down by an American fighter jet during the Cold War. Everyone perished, including one or both his parents. (For obvious reasons I have to be vague about the finer details.)
He teamed up with the Russians only this year, as act of revenge against America, after he fell for Russian propaganda that the war is against NATO itself. A decade or three ago he took up flying himself for a non-NATO European country, but failed an important airforce exam to qualify as fighter pilot. Who knows what his plans were? But his urge to get justice didn't subside after he left that airforce.
The coming investigation will certainly pull apart everything he did from buying underwear to why he stopped drinking, and more. (Spoiler alert: he was in a car after a party in his 20s, with a drunk driver, and then another drunk driver hit them. One or more of his friends died, and it was filmed on an old Nokia phone.)
How would you, the reader, reacted if you were in his shoes? Is he really the bad guy, despite innocent soldiers defending their country dying as result of his actions? I'm just asking, not choosing his side.
Since tonight's drama going down is an intelligence driven operation, I'm not sure if it will make the public news soon. Hacker forums on the dark web may get wind of it though, if one of the hacker collective should say something. Unlikely though, too much at stake.
Certainly, as my guesstimate, the Israeli Mossad will be informed about the exposé, because the spy colluded with some Iranian officials this year. (Don't think about drone technology, okay.) Not sure for how long he was involved with those toweled zombies. I suspect the spy will be swapped for a Ukrainian intelligence operative in future, in which case I may tell the whole story. And man, do I have much more! 😁
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