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ID: cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/fingerprints

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CIA 2010 covert communication websites / Fingerprints by

Ciro Santilli 37  Updated 2025-05-26  +Created 1970-01-01

From The Reuters websites and others we've found, we can establish see some clear stylistic trends across the websites which would allow us to find other likely candidates upon inspection:

natural sounding, sometimes long-ish, domain names generally with 2 or 3 full words. Most in English language, but a few in Spanish, and very few in other languages like French.
shallow websites with a few tabs, many external links, sometimes many images, and few internal pages
common themes include:
- news
- hobbies, notably sports, travel and photography. Golf seems overrepresented. Must be a thing over there in Langley.
.com and .net top-level domains, plus a few other very rare non .com .net TLDs, notably .info and .org
each one has one "communication mechanism file": communication mechanisms
narrow page width like in the days of old, lots of images
split header images
some common pattern they follow in their news lists:
- ul.rss-items > li.rss-item, e.g.: web.archive.org/web/20110202092126/http://beamingnews.com/
- links with class a.newslink and a.newslinkalt e.g. web.archive.org/web/20110128181622/http://profile-news.com/

The most notable dissonance from the rest of the web is that there are no commercial looking website of companies, presumably because it was felt that it would be possible to verify the existence of such companies.

Most domains are the only domain for its IP, i.e. the websites are mostly private hosted. However we have later found many exceptions to this general indicator, so it should not be used as a strong exclusion rule.

It would be fun to actually reverse search into one of their stock image provider's original images. Ones we've found:

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