Terror group al Qaeda hid messages in porn video

For quite some time, international terrorist group al Qaeda managed to slip secret messages and plans past security officials by hiding them in – drum roll, please – porn videos. Yet, there could be some method behind the seeming madness: The terrorist network appeared to have made use of a digital form of steganography, the science of security through obscurity. “The video would be easier to ship and distribute. Whoever has ability to decrypt the code would be the intended audience,” Discovery News quoted Kenneth James Ryan, professor of criminology at California State University, Fresno, and a counter-terrorism expert, as saying. Discovery News cited recent reports by the German newspaper Die Zeit and Cable News Network that a Pakistani al Qaeda operative was caught by German security officials with a memory disk that contained a pornographic video. Inside the video was a file called “Sexy Tanja” that contained some 100 documents outlining plans for terror attacks throughout Europe, the report said. Discovery News quoted David Wagner, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley and an encryption expert, as saying a video file would have plenty of space to hide digital documents. Also, it noted that while it would have taken a real steganography professional to hide the data before, commercial software can now get the job done. Smuggling data Wagner said human rights workers have also been using steganography to hide testimony by exploited workers or political prisoners from government security forces. Testimonies can be encrypted onto a file on a cellular phone, which can then be scanned at a customs checkpoint without revealing the hidden documents, Discovery News noted. “Each pixel in a digital image has a number associated with it. By slightly tweaking the color of a pixel, the author can encrypt a pattern of information,” Discovery News said. It said that while the human eye may not detect such subtle differences in the pixels, steganography software can. In al Qaeda’s case, Wagner said the documents could have been layered in between digital components of the video file. Discovery News cited the CNN report as saying it took German cryptologists months to break the code, but the result was a spectacular trove of internal al Qaeda documents. Hidden in plain sight Peter Earnest, executive director of the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., said steganography “is very difficult to detect because it is hidden in plain sight; you don’t know it’s there.” On the other hand, Steven Weber, professor of information at UC Berkeley, said hiding terror plots in a porn video could be a way of doing just that. “It could be someone said, ‘this is the last place they will look,’” Weber said. “Or they thought it would be uncomfortable for a government analyst to look at porn videos on their laptop screen. Maybe it was an effort to keep it out of the limelight.” — LBG, GMA News