The CIA has no shortage of imagination when it comes to communicating with its secret agents. The American intelligence agency used a fake Star Wars website to send messages to its spies in the early 2010s. Behind this nostalgic homage to the Sith and Jedi was a secret connection system...
Fake Star Wars, Real Secret Agents
You thought you'd seen it all, but the internet is full of strange surprises, even under their innocuous exterior. This is the case with StarWarsWeb.net, a seemingly basic Star Wars fan site... Except that it's run by the CIA to communicate with spies abroad! As an average Internet user, you had access to fan content posted on the site, such as Yoda quotes or articles on lightsabers. However, if you were connected to the intelligence agency, you could unlock a secure line to CIA officials by typing a password into the search bar. At least, that's what was planned, as the site had been sloppily coded, "reusing sequential IP addresses or other easily traceable breadcrumbs," according to independent researcher Ciro Santilli, and was quickly uncovered.
This Star Wars site wasn't an isolated case
And it's not the only site created by the CIA for the purpose of communicating with its agents! By digging deeper into a 2022 Reuters article, titled America's Throwaway Spies, about suspicious domains, Ciro Santilli discovered hundreds of similar sites. His tools? Open-source software and web development knowledge. The CIA had dozens and dozens of other cover sites, covering extreme sports, comedy, Brazilian music... There was something for everyone, but it turns out that counterintelligence agencies, particularly Iranian and Chinese, caught on very quickly a decade ago. These two countries, upon discovering that the CIA's cover sites were targeting some of their citizens, executed CIA spies in 2011 and 2012.
And to discover 7 conspiracy theories that are actually completely true, click here.
0 Comments