The Space Review: Stars in the sky: The top secret URSALA, RAQUEL, and FARRAH satellites from the 1970s to the 21st century
spycraft
The Cellmate Who Taught Me the Codes of Russian Prison
In an excerpt from his book “This Cursed Beautiful Land,” Evan Gershkovich, a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, writes about his experience in Moscow’s Lefortovo prison.
A Researcher Buys 6TB Of Anthropic Claude Data Dump From A China-Based LLM Router, Finds Enough Ammo To Hack Xiaomi, Huawei, And Chinese…
Anthropic Claude's routing logs held SSH keys, VPN configs, and cloud API tokens that developers unknowingly paste into AI prompts.
The coolest anti-surveillance tools at Defcon
I met with hackers who are building tools to fight the surveillance state.
Tracking a Sanctioned Russian Vessel’s West African Odyssey - bellingcat
Cargo vessel reported to have transported weapons destined for Russian mercenaries has been shuttling between West African ports since March.
The CIA's Mystery Plane?
A plane registered to a Virginia LLC wound up involved in a CIA covert action near the Galapagos
A bungled bomb plot in Poland exposed a spy – but whose spy was he?
The long read: When exiled Russian opposition campaigner Igor Rogov was accused of working for the Kremlin, his friends were shocked. Could this young activist have really been an undercover agent?
The phone book that led us to Assad's spy chief in hiding
How we tracked down "The Spider" who was once one of the most-feared men in Syria.
The Glass Famine
Spies, war, industrial subterfuge and secret recipes. And it all really happened. Honestly, what more could you ask for?
Inside Israel’s Secret Operation to Cultivate Ahmadinejad
The yearslong effort to groom the former Iranian president as an intelligence asset culminated in a dramatic effort to take him to an Israeli safe house in the early days of the war. But the plan fell apart.
Birthing The Blackbird
The weird designs that preceded the SR-71
Make Yourself Expensive: A Field Guide to Shrinking Your Data Footprint
Asked under oath last week whether he would commit to not buying Americans’ location data without a warrant, the Director of the FBI declined.
Encryption, spyware, and now Mythos: History shows why cyber export control doesn't work | TechCrunch
For the last 30 years, stopping the flow of cybersecurity-related software has proven to be ineffective. It's unclear why it would work now with Anthropic’s cybersecurity model Mythos.
How to Hack a Superyacht | The Walrus
GPS is critical to everything from shipping to warfare. Tricking it is ridiculously easy
How Soviet prisons spread a secret 'language of thieves' now spoken by millions
The tricks of the jail jargon Fenya were once used to bewilder guards in Stalin's Gulags. Now they are now being used by Russian cyber-criminals.
A satellite company supporting Ukraine appears to be in Russia's crosshairs - Ars Technica
This capability is not common for satellites conducting typical missions."
The man who blew up a nuclear power station and disappeared
The long read: In December 1982, South African Rodney Wilkinson walked four bombs into Koeberg power station – the crown jewel of the apartheid state – pulled the pins and then left on his bicycle. How did he do it?
They Came to Spy on America. They Stayed to Coach Little League.
In the wake of the Cold War, some Soviet bloc spies decided their fake American lives weren’t so bad.
Bellingcat’s New Tool to Explore Historical and Spatial Flight Data
Turnstone can visualise historical trends in flight data or filter them by geography, aircraft type and other parameters.
The Greatest Double Agent Ever: How a Spanish Chicken Farmer Became the Most Important Double Agent in WWII
Juan Pujol García was one of the rare individuals whose participation in World War II made him a Member of the Order of the British Empire and earned him the Iron Cross. He gained that unlikely distinction in perhaps the riskiest of all roles in espionage, that of a double agent.
We are all le Carré’s people now
Once again, John le Carré is back. The TV series inspired by his post-Cold War novel, The Night Manager, is returning to our screens on New Year’s Day. There’s an exhibition about his “tradecraft” on
How Did the CIA Lose a Nuclear Device? - Slashdot
Sixty years after a team of American and Indian climbers abandoned a plutonium-powered generator on the slopes of Nanda Devi, one of the world's most forbidding Himalayan peaks, the U.S. government still refuses to acknowledge that the mission ever happened. The device, a…
The Last Word On Nothing | Alternative Realities at the NRO
A classified satellite network is emitting a mysterious signal : NPR
An amateur satellite tracker stumbled across the signal which is coming from Starshield satellites in a "hidden" part of the radio spectrum.
It's unclear what the satellite constellation is up to. Starlink, SpaceX's public satellite internet network, operates at much higher frequencies to enable the transmission of broadband data. Starshield, by contrast, is using a much lower frequency range that probably only allows for the…
In and Out at the FSB: A Window into the Moscow Life of Wirecard's Jan Marsalek
German police have been searching for years for Jan Marsalek, who is suspected of having embezzled billions of euros through Wirecard and thought to be working as an agent for the Russian intelligence agency FSB. DER SPIEGEL tracked him down in Moscow.
Opinion | Christo Grozev Is the Man Putin Couldn’t Kill
Putin had Christo Grozev in his sights. Grozev was way ahead of him.
The Secret History of America’s Involvement in the Ukraine War
This is the untold story of America’s hidden role in Ukrainian military operations against Russia’s invading armies.
A Spy Satellite You’ve Never Heard of Helped Win the Cold War
Engineers at the Naval Research Lab launched a spy satellite program called Parcae and revolutionized signals intelligence at the height of the Cold War. The program relied on computers to sift through intelligence data, providing a technological edge at a pivotal moment in the…
How to Stage a Coup
"I'm now going to offer you a megalomaniac explanation of the course of events"
Discover the CIA’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual: A Timeless Guide to Subverting Any Organization with “Purposeful Stupidity” (1944)
I’ve always admired people who can successfully navigate what I refer to as “Kafka’s Castle,” a term of dread for the many government and corporate agencies that have an inordinate amount of power over our permanent records, and that seem as inscrutable and chillingly absurd as…
How to Catch a Lab Leak
"Hey boss, I've just managed to kill a whole bunch of people here"
When the C.I.A. Messes Up
Its agents are often depicted as malevolent puppet masters—or as bumbling idiots. The truth is even less comforting.
In the Game of Spy vs. Spy, Israel Keeps Getting the Better of Iran
Repressing dissent, putting innocent people in prison, flubbing operations abroad—Iran just can’t seem to get out of its own way.
Preserve Vital Online Content With Bellingcat's Auto Archiver
Online posts can be taken down by platforms or deleted by those posting them. That's why Bellingcat has created a tool, the Auto Archiver, to help quickly and easily archive online content.
The Sci-Fi Writer Who Invented Conspiracy Theory
It all goes back to one man in the 1950s: a military-intelligence expert in psychological warfare.
The Scientist and the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Control Killing Machine
Israeli agents had wanted to kill Iran’s top nuclear scientist for years. Then they came up with a way to do it with no operatives present.
Did a Female Chinese Super Spy Wreck CIA Ops?
SpyTalk plumbs Chinese intel history for facts behind David Ignatius's semi-fictional "The Tao of Deception"
High Anxiety - by Henry R. Schlesinger - SpyTalk
David Ignatius’ latest thriller is a tour de space force, spies and satellite warfare
The Czech illegals: Husband and wife outed as GRU spies aiding bombings and
GRU Unit 29155, Russia’s assassination and sabotage squad, blew up ammunition warehouses in Czechia. It had help from Elena and Nikolai Šapošnikov, a family of deep-cover spies working as arms dealers.
Exclusive | Inside Amazon’s Secret Operation to Gather Intel on Rivals
Staff went undercover on Walmart, eBay and other marketplaces as a third-party seller called ‘Big River.’ The mission: to scoop up information on pricing, logistics and other business practices.
Intriguing Vintage Spy Cameras: Covert Wonders of Espionage’s Golden Age
Explore the fascinating world of vintage spy cameras from the Golden Age of Espionage. Discover covert wonders in this intriguing collection.
How to Get Started: Investigating Payment Gateways Online
Investigating the financial transactions of an organisation can reveal details about its connections and funding. Here's a quick guide on how to do it.
‘Priority target’: The businessman at the top of Australia’s intelligence h
The suspect’s identification by intelligence agencies raises big questions for one of Australia’s neighbours and about China’s attempts to wield influence in the Pacific.
A most wanted man: Fugitive Wirecard COO Jan Marsalek exposed as decade-lon
Fugitive Wirecard COO Jan Marsalek wasn’t just responsible for Germany’s largest financial fraud in history. He was also a decade-long Russian spy.
From the archive: ‘A chain of stupidity’: the Skripal case and the decline
From 2020: The unmasking of the Salisbury poisoning suspects by a new digital journalism outfit was an embarrassment for Putin – and evidence that Russian spies are not what they once were. By Luke Harding
How the Pentagon Learned to Use Targeted Ads to Find Its Targets—and Vladim
Meet the guy who taught US intelligence agencies how to make the most of the ad tech ecosystem, "the largest information-gathering enterprise ever conceived by man."
How Russian Spies Get Flipped or Expelled, As Told by a Spycatcher
Caught a Russian spy? You may try to flip them, or expel them – an interview with former Hungarian counterintelligence officer Ferenc Katrein
The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin
For more than a decade, the United States has nurtured a secret intelligence partnership with Ukraine that is now critical for both countries in countering Russia.
Russia’s shadow tanker fleet runs into trouble
Every day, millions of barrels of oil are being transported by ships with obscured ownership and origin. But is the game up?
How a Group of Israel-Linked Hackers Has Pushed the Limits of Cyberwar
From repeatedly crippling thousands of gas stations to setting a steel mill on fire, Predatory Sparrow’s offensive hacking has now targeted Iranians with some of history's most aggressive cyberattacks.