Catboy Ranch
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 21, 2022
I wanted to OP this sperg because I thought this would be interesting since it's a deviation of your normal OPSEC shit you've read a thousand times and the paranoia/sane-advice from Edward Snowden.
It comes off what we know (right now) about the Crooks shooter (the 20 year old shooting at Trump)
We did know from some of his HS video footage from some torn-apart desktops that he probably was a PC nerd and heavily online like the rest of us. However, very little is known from the mains that have been found (thusfar), with Discord coming forward and saying his account was lightly used. But he was wearing a Demolition Ranch shirt, which is merch he or someone else got from a guntuber. FBI also said they found explosives (probably tannerite, which is legal in PA... it goes boom when you shoot at it).
His almost nothing Internet presence makes me believe he was a Low Signal Nigga.
Unlike how regular privacy paranoid nerds do OPSEC--where they want their activity and their data to remain as anonymous as possible, a low-signal nigga runs OPSEC with the full expectation that all their physical devices will be confiscated. Much the same way as someone traveling to Tel-Aviv expects all their electronic devices and SD cards to be searched at Ben Gurion. Oh, did you lock something down with a password? You will go through intense questioning and the device will be confiscated, every memdump trick the Israelis know about will be attempted, and then your device will be destroyed.
Here's some of the techniques a low signal nigga would employ:
Plausible deniability - instead of avoiding social media, you join it. But these mains are your fake mains. You keep them up. You don't give a fuck about cookies, browser finger printing... you run your main PC and your main accounts just like Grandma95.
The twist is that you maintain another set of mains. But getting to these "real" mains, where you pull up your non-normie content and poast, you access a special way.
Indirection - Instead of normiefag VPNs that everyone knows about, you set up your own connection path on the Internet. Not with Torbrowser, but your own IKEv2/ovpn (if you want to also hop on from a cell phone), or if you're going to be PC-only, i2p, and you run (or borrow) your own edge node. There are black market WGAF VPS providers out there, or if you have access to a crew--you go get one from them. From there you can fire up tinyproxy. For extra stealth (so lazy nerds stay cold), port-knocking will hide the VPN server port from being found in scans.
Yes, you will have to keep a key on the device and it goes to an IP address... so this is what you scratch with a dead man switch.
Dead Mans Switch - either a kill script to be run on cue, triggered any way you want, or run from a clocker if some expected thing is supposed to happen and it didn't, the killscript nukes the keys to the bridge and shuts the VPS down. You can just manually nuke the VPN settings on your phone, even if the settings are recovered it won't amount to jack squat. Making the dead switch very easy to trigger is pretty fun.
The best one I have seen so far and copycatted is to a hack on a smart lampswitch--flipping the switch on/off 3 times very fast triggers ssh/rexec. A less dev-intensive one is a killplug, like a redundant Ethernet connection and an ifdown script that fires when the cable is pulled out, but a smartplug that you can kick out of the electrical outlet with your feet and a ping that stops working can be the trigger. There's a million things that can be done to make a kill.
Once the kill is run, critical keys (and configs) protecting the OPSEC go bye-bye. For added protection, another deadman is also at the VPS.
Big brother scoops up all the devices and starts forensics, and they will be wallowing in cat videos, homework, pirated movies, porn, the usual.
Signal amplification - where possible, increasing the universe of what has to be searched greatly frustrates the search. Backing up other people's computers on to the NAS, making a bunch of /dev/rnd files but with enticing names... just like with the fakemains, the rest of your activity you put in the clear should boost your normiefag level to the max. Data hoarders are much harder to search. So finding a 20 byte nugget in 90TB of crap can be terrible; there's no AI that will help with that.
Avoid Localfagging - traditional OPSEC places a lot of emphasis on encrypting local drives and volumes, then privacy autists take that a step further to virtual disk volumes and look into making russian doll volumes and LUKS-in-a-box volumes. A low signal nigga wants his box to look like Grandma's Chromebook... the whole point is to look boring.... so doing shit that loudly advertises "Hi I am trying to hide from you!" is avoided.
That's one of the frustrations that the Israelis have. Because their confiscation and suspicion got so heightened, journalists and others trying to avoid the draconian security apparatus would just wipe their laptops clean with an empty OS, then the authorities had absolutely nothing to search.
Once at the hotel, then they would bring down the environment. That leaves the Israelis more interested in hacking the hell out of phones trying to lift MFA codes and auths.
If this turns into the Las Vegas Shooter thing where we never hear about this kid again, my money is that he low-signal-nigga'd the Feds and fucked them over good.
It comes off what we know (right now) about the Crooks shooter (the 20 year old shooting at Trump)
We did know from some of his HS video footage from some torn-apart desktops that he probably was a PC nerd and heavily online like the rest of us. However, very little is known from the mains that have been found (thusfar), with Discord coming forward and saying his account was lightly used. But he was wearing a Demolition Ranch shirt, which is merch he or someone else got from a guntuber. FBI also said they found explosives (probably tannerite, which is legal in PA... it goes boom when you shoot at it).
His almost nothing Internet presence makes me believe he was a Low Signal Nigga.
Unlike how regular privacy paranoid nerds do OPSEC--where they want their activity and their data to remain as anonymous as possible, a low-signal nigga runs OPSEC with the full expectation that all their physical devices will be confiscated. Much the same way as someone traveling to Tel-Aviv expects all their electronic devices and SD cards to be searched at Ben Gurion. Oh, did you lock something down with a password? You will go through intense questioning and the device will be confiscated, every memdump trick the Israelis know about will be attempted, and then your device will be destroyed.
Here's some of the techniques a low signal nigga would employ:
Plausible deniability - instead of avoiding social media, you join it. But these mains are your fake mains. You keep them up. You don't give a fuck about cookies, browser finger printing... you run your main PC and your main accounts just like Grandma95.
The twist is that you maintain another set of mains. But getting to these "real" mains, where you pull up your non-normie content and poast, you access a special way.
Indirection - Instead of normiefag VPNs that everyone knows about, you set up your own connection path on the Internet. Not with Torbrowser, but your own IKEv2/ovpn (if you want to also hop on from a cell phone), or if you're going to be PC-only, i2p, and you run (or borrow) your own edge node. There are black market WGAF VPS providers out there, or if you have access to a crew--you go get one from them. From there you can fire up tinyproxy. For extra stealth (so lazy nerds stay cold), port-knocking will hide the VPN server port from being found in scans.
Yes, you will have to keep a key on the device and it goes to an IP address... so this is what you scratch with a dead man switch.
Dead Mans Switch - either a kill script to be run on cue, triggered any way you want, or run from a clocker if some expected thing is supposed to happen and it didn't, the killscript nukes the keys to the bridge and shuts the VPS down. You can just manually nuke the VPN settings on your phone, even if the settings are recovered it won't amount to jack squat. Making the dead switch very easy to trigger is pretty fun.
The best one I have seen so far and copycatted is to a hack on a smart lampswitch--flipping the switch on/off 3 times very fast triggers ssh/rexec. A less dev-intensive one is a killplug, like a redundant Ethernet connection and an ifdown script that fires when the cable is pulled out, but a smartplug that you can kick out of the electrical outlet with your feet and a ping that stops working can be the trigger. There's a million things that can be done to make a kill.
Once the kill is run, critical keys (and configs) protecting the OPSEC go bye-bye. For added protection, another deadman is also at the VPS.
Big brother scoops up all the devices and starts forensics, and they will be wallowing in cat videos, homework, pirated movies, porn, the usual.
Signal amplification - where possible, increasing the universe of what has to be searched greatly frustrates the search. Backing up other people's computers on to the NAS, making a bunch of /dev/rnd files but with enticing names... just like with the fakemains, the rest of your activity you put in the clear should boost your normiefag level to the max. Data hoarders are much harder to search. So finding a 20 byte nugget in 90TB of crap can be terrible; there's no AI that will help with that.
Avoid Localfagging - traditional OPSEC places a lot of emphasis on encrypting local drives and volumes, then privacy autists take that a step further to virtual disk volumes and look into making russian doll volumes and LUKS-in-a-box volumes. A low signal nigga wants his box to look like Grandma's Chromebook... the whole point is to look boring.... so doing shit that loudly advertises "Hi I am trying to hide from you!" is avoided.
That's one of the frustrations that the Israelis have. Because their confiscation and suspicion got so heightened, journalists and others trying to avoid the draconian security apparatus would just wipe their laptops clean with an empty OS, then the authorities had absolutely nothing to search.
Once at the hotel, then they would bring down the environment. That leaves the Israelis more interested in hacking the hell out of phones trying to lift MFA codes and auths.
If this turns into the Las Vegas Shooter thing where we never hear about this kid again, my money is that he low-signal-nigga'd the Feds and fucked them over good.
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