Intelligence Bungle Leads to Al Qaeda’s Intranet Going Dark

October 9, 2007 | By Sniper One |

Just because Suicide Bombers are at that bottom of the intellectual ecosystem, doesn’t mean that the Information System (hackers) guys working for Al Qaeda are morons. It would appear that they can read the writing on the wall as well as the next guy.

WASHINGTON — Al Qaeda’s Internet communications system has suddenly gone dark to American intelligence after the leak of Osama bin Laden’s September 11 speech inadvertently disclosed the fact that we had penetrated the enemy’s system.
The intelligence blunder started with what appeared at the time as an American intelligence victory, namely that the federal government had intercepted, a full four days before it was to be aired, a video of Osama bin Laden’s first appearance in three years in a video address marking the sixth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001. On the morning of September 7, the Web site of ABC News posted excerpts from the speech.
But the disclosure from ABC and later other news organizations tipped off Qaeda’s internal security division that the organization’s Internet communications system, known among American intelligence analysts as Obelisk, was compromised. This network of Web sites serves not only as the distribution system for the videos produced by Al Qaeda’s production company, As-Sahab, but also as the equivalent of a corporate intranet, dealing with such mundane matters as expense reporting and clerical memos to mid- and lower-level Qaeda operatives throughout the world.
While intranets are usually based on servers in a discrete physical location, Obelisk is a series of sites all over the Web, often with fake names, in some cases sites that are not even known by their proprietors to have been hacked by Al Qaeda.

Better details from the The New York Sun…

A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.
Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company’s Web site. By mid-afternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.
The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group’s communications network.

Seem obvious that the terror-nerds have done the prudent thing and issued a communication via an alternative method to alert the real jihadis of a new location for “Obelisk“. Makes sense to me, when you think you have a breach, you setup a new site, or collection of sites, then you issue a message via a secure method… requiring identification and validation. That way only the people you want to have access to the new site have access.

You also review the procedures you have in place, to see where the “holes” are in the system that may have allowed the breach in the first place.

In short…

“Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless,” said Rita Katz, the firm’s 44-year-old founder, who has garnered wide attention by publicizing statements and videos from extremist chat rooms and Web sites, while attracting controversy over the secrecy of SITE’s methodology.

Way to go people, you take something that is working and you trash it by being impatient or egomaniacal.

This needs to be investigated, and those responsible for blowing this need to be prosecuted.

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