I remember watching the movie "Traitor" a few years back and wondering if Al Qaida used something similar to what the fictional terrorists were using in that movie.
(From what I remember, they were merely writing messages and saving them as drafts. Then others would log on and read the drafts. No emails were sent.)
Interesting though how much he relied on couriers.
Lots of malware actually uses this to communicate with infected hosts now-a-days. You see it a lot in the backdoors used for more targeted attacks.
AFAIK, going wayyy back, this strategy was first talked about by Sophsec at an infosec conference in 2006. They made a library called libomg that would log into social networks and webmail to communicate with infected bots and they had various strategies for doing so. The most hilarious was the myspace module which automatically set up networks of teen girls who chatted in uh teen-speak, which were actually hidden commands for the other bots to log in and retrieve. It was awesome.
The most hilarious was the myspace module which
automatically set up networks of teen girls
who chatted in uh teen-speak
Makes sense - teen-speak barely means anything and it's frustrating as hell to read, so normal people usually turn away before starting to see suspicious patterns.
I recall that this was the strategy that the 9/11 terrorists used to communicate. I suppose that the Richard Stallman approach is the next evolution of it.
Synchronizing mail (and other online assets) offline via a periodic push/pull process, similar to the USB-stick process.
For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I
also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I
send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me.
It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.
Also elsewhere he says that he rarely has an active internet connection, so presumably the demon runs and mailserver flushes during the window that his internet is on.
(From what I remember, they were merely writing messages and saving them as drafts. Then others would log on and read the drafts. No emails were sent.)
Interesting though how much he relied on couriers.