Ciro Santilli Initial announcements by self on 2023-06-10:
- twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1667532991315230720. Follow up when more domains were found: twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1717445686214504830
- www.reddit.com/r/OSINT/comments/146185r/i_found_16_new_cia_covert_communication_websites/. Marked as SPAM 5 by mods days later. After reaching 92 votes, a very positive reply for that niche sub, and being obviously on topic. Weird. Anyways, did its job and likely kicked off hackernews.
- www.facebook.com/cirosantilli/posts/pfbid04KvRbEXghJakcD4AQz4379L5oVjPZ6vrBF1Eak3p81VnqRSXuXdvvYonCWPhGfQXl
Shared by others soo after:
- 2023-06-11:
- news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36279375#36280220 (212 points). Shame that this was published when we only had about 20 websites. As of writing we had 240. Might have been a greater hit then.
- Google Analytics backlink from lms.fh-wedel.de/ path unknown. Some shitty German university: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fachhochschule_Wedel_University_of_Applied_Sciences LMS stands for Learning management system, apparently a Moodle instance. Maybe they have some Open educational resources, but all in German so pointless
- www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/14705gp/cia_2010_covert_communication_websites/ failed attempt with bad link unfortunately
- a few days later:
- 2023-06-19 www.reddit.com/r/numberstations/comments/14dexiu/after_numbers_stations_vanished/ (30 points) off topic on that sub, but thankfully was not deleted, interesting sub topic
2023-10-26 twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1717445686214504830: announcement by self after finding 75 more sites
Second wave:
- 2023-12-01: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38492304 (65 points). Second submission but pointing to OurBigBook.com rather than cirosantilli.com: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/cia-2010-covert-communication-websites We take those. Reached only 65 points as of January 2024.
- 2023-12-02: buttondown.email/grugq/archive/december-2-2023/. "grugq" is the handle of a zero day dealer whose received some scrutiny in 2012 after a Forbes protile was written about him: archive.ph/7mUG5. He comments:
I don’t think anyone anticipated that databases leaked by hackers would enable OSINT researchers to conduct counterintelligence investigations that rival the state security services.
presumably referring to DNS Census 2013.
Some more:/ny
- 2024-01-12: twitter.com/jeremy_wokka/status/1745657801584656564 (40k followers, mid of thread)
- 2024-01-15: Oleg Shakirov's findings, publication announced by Ciro Santilli at: twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1747742453778559165 two days later
- 2024-01-23: ipinf.ru gives 4 hits and 4 new suspects, announced at: mastodon.social/@cirosantilli/111807480628392615