CIA 2010 covert communication websites Updated 2025-03-28 +Created 1970-01-01
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This article is about covert agent communication channel websites used by the CIA in many countries from the late 2000s until the early 2010s, when they were uncovered by counter intelligence of the targeted countries circa 2011-2013. This discovery led to the imprisonment and execution of several assets in Iran and China, and subsequent shutdown of the channel.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/CIA_Star_Wars_website_promo.jpg
Video 1.
How I found a Star Wars website made by the CIA by Ciro Santilli
. Source. Slightly edited VOD of the talk Aratu Week 2024 Talk by Ciro Santilli: My Best Random Projects.
The existence of such websites was first reported in November 2018 by Yahoo News: www.yahoo.com/video/cias-communications-suffered-catastrophic-compromise-started-iran-090018710.html.
Previous whispers had been heard in 2017 but without clear mention of websites: www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia-spies-espionage.html:
Some were convinced that a mole within the C.I.A. had betrayed the United States. Others believed that the Chinese had hacked the covert system the C.I.A. used to communicate with its foreign sources. Years later, that debate remains unresolved.
[...]
From the final weeks of 2010 through the end of 2012, [...] the Chinese killed at least a dozen of the C.I.A.’s sources. [...] One was shot in front of his colleagues in the courtyard of a government building — a message to others who might have been working for the C.I.A.
Most notably, starting in 2008, CIA contractor John Reidy started raising concerns about the security of the communication systems used, but he was silenced and ignored, leading to catastrophe.[ref][ref]
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/Yahoo_CIA_website_article.png
Then in September 2022 a few specific websites were finally reported by Reuters: www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-spies-iran/, henceforth known only as "the Reuters article" in this article.
Figure 1.
Banner of the Reuters article
. Source.
Figure 2.
Reuters reconstruction of what the applet would have looked like
. Source.
Figure 3.
Inspecting the Reuters article HTML source code
. Source. The Reuters article only gave one URL explicitly: iraniangoals.com. But most others could be found by inspecting the HTML of the screenshots provided, except for the Carson website.
Ciro Santilli heard about the 2018 article at around 2020 while studying for his China campaign because the websites had been used to take down the Chinese CIA network in China. He even asked on Quora: www.quora.com/What-were-some-examples-of-the-websites-that-the-CIA-used-around-2010-as-a-communication-mechanism-for-its-spies-in-China-and-Iran-but-were-later-found-and-used-to-take-down-their-spy-networks but there were no publicly known domains at the time to serve as a starting point. Chris, Electrical Engineer and former Avionics Tech in the US Navy, even replied suggesting that obviously the CIA is so competent that it would never ever have its sites leaked like that:
Seriously a dumb question.
So when Ciro Santilli heard about the 2022 article almost a year after publication, and being a half-arsed web developer himself, he knew he had to try and find some of the domains himself using the newly available information! It was an irresistible real-life capture the flag. The thing is, everyone who has ever developed a website knows that its attack surface is about the size of Texas, and the potential for fingerprinting is off the charts with so many bits and pieces sticking out. Chris, get fucked.
Figure 4.
"Seriously a dumb question" Quora answer by Chris from the US Navy
. Source.
In particular, it is fun to have such a clear and visible to anyone examples of the USA spying on its own allies in the form of Wayback Machine archives.
Given that it was reported that there were "more than 350" such websites, it would be really cool if we could uncover more of those websites ourselves beyond the 9 domains reported by Reuters!
This article documents the list of extremely likely candidates Ciro has found so far, mostly using:
more details on methods also follow. It is still far from the 885 websites reported by citizenlabs, so there must be key techniques missing. But the fact that there are no Google Search hits for the domains or IPs (except in bulk e.g. in expired domain trackers) indicates that these might not have been previously clearly publicly disclosed.
If anyone can find others, or has better techniques: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli". The techniques used so far have been very heuristic, and that added to the limited amount of data makes it almost certain that several IP ranges have been missed. There are two types of contributions that would be possible:
Perhaps the current heuristically obtained data can serve as a good starting for a more data-oriented search that will eventually find a valuable fingerprint which brings the entire network out.
Disclaimer: the network fell in 2013, followed by fully public disclosures in 2018 and 2022, so we believe it is now more than safe for the public to know what can still be uncovered about the events that took place. The main author's political bias is strongly pro-democracy and anti-dictatorship.
May this list serve as a tribute to those who spent their days making, using, and uncovering these websites under the shadows.
If you want to go into one of the best OSINT CTFs of your life, stop reading now and see how many Web Archives you can find starting only from the Reuters article as Ciro did. Some guidelines:
  • there was no ultra-clean fingerprint found yet. Some intuitive and somewhat guessy data analysis was needed. But when you clean the data correctly and make good guesses, many hits follow, it feels so good
  • nothing was paid for data. But using cybercafe Wifi's for a few extra IPs may help.
Figure 5.
viewdns.info activegameinfo.com domain to IP
. Source.
Figure 6.
viewdns.info aroundthemiddleeast.com IP to domain
. Source.
Figure 7.
DNS Census 2013 website
. Source. This source provided valuable historical domain to IP data. It was likely extracted with an illegal botnet. Data excerpt from the CSVs:
amazon.com,2012-02-01T21:33:36,72.21.194.1
amazon.com,2012-02-01T21:33:36,72.21.211.176
amazon.com,2013-10-02T19:03:39,72.21.194.212
amazon.com,2013-10-02T19:03:39,72.21.215.232
amazon.com.au,2012-02-10T08:03:38,207.171.166.22
amazon.com.au,2012-02-10T08:03:38,72.21.206.80
google.com,2012-01-28T05:33:40,74.125.159.103
google.com,2012-01-28T05:33:40,74.125.159.104
google.com,2013-10-02T19:02:35,74.125.239.41
google.com,2013-10-02T19:02:35,74.125.239.46
Figure 8.
The four communication mechanisms used by the CIA websites
. Java Applets, Adobe Flash, JavaScript and HTTPS
Figure 9.
Expired domain names by day 2011
. Source. The scraping of expired domain trackers to Github was one of the positive outcomes of this project.
Video 2.
Compromised Comms by Darknet Diaries (2023)
Source.
It was the YouTube suggestion for this video that made Ciro Santilli aware of the Reuters article almost one year after its publication, which kickstarted his research on the topic.
Full podcast transcript: darknetdiaries.com/transcript/75/
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Are there .org hits? Updated 2025-03-28 +Created 1970-01-01
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Previously it was unclear if there were any .org hits, until we found the first one with clear comms: web.archive.org/web/20110624203548/http://awfaoi.org/hand.jar
Later on, two more clear ones were found with expired domain trackers:
  • azerinews.org
  • autism-news.org
further settling their existence. Later on newimages.org also came to light.
Others that had been previously found in IP ranges but without clear comms:
  • 65.61.127.177: material-science.org
  • 212.4.17.61: tech-stop.org
Others in IP ranges by unarchived:
  • 74.116.72.244 arborstribune.org
.org is very rare, and has been excluded from some of our search heuristics. That was a shame, but likely not much was missed.
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Searching for Carson Updated 2025-03-28 +Created 1970-01-01
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Edit: Carson was found Oleg Shakirov's findingsby Oleg Shakirov: alljohnny.com, communicated at: twitter.com/shakirov2036/status/1746729471778988499, earliest archive from 2004 (!): web.archive.org/web/20040113025122/http://alljohnny.com/, The domain was hidden in plain sight, it was present in a not very visible watermark visible in the Reuters article screenshot! The watermark was added to the CIA to the background image, it is actually present on the website. In retrospect, it was actually present at on the expired domain trackers dataset, but the mega discrete all second word made Ciro Santilli miss it: github.com/cirosantilli/expired-domain-names-by-day-2015/blob/9d504f3b85364a64f7db93311e70011344cff788/07/05/02#L1572
Figure 1.
2004 Wayback Machine archive of alljohnny.com
.
What follows is the previous
The fact that the Reuters article has a screenshot of it, and therefore a Wayback Machine link, plus the specificity of the website topic, will likely keep Ciro awake at night for a while until someone finds that domain.
Some text visible on the Reuters screenshot:
  • Johnny Carson and The Tonight Show
  • Your Favorite Host and Comedic Genius
  • Submit Your Favorite Carson Moment
  • Heeere's Johnny!
    Holy crap, the "Here's Johnny" line from The Shining (1980) is a reference to Johnny Carson: www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDpipB4yehk, www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYnyPAkgyvc, Ciro never knew that... but every American would have understood it at the time.
It is unclear however if this text is plaintext or part of a an image.
Some failed attempts, either dry guesses or from DNS grepping dataset searches:
Searching the Wayback Machine proved fruitless. There is no full text search: Wayback Machine full text search, and a heuristic web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/Johnny%20Carson search has relevant hits but not the one we want.
Another attempt was to search for "carson" on webmasterhome.cn which lists expired domains in bulk by expiration day, and it search engine friendly. It contains most of the domains we've found so far. Google either doesn't support partial word search or requires you to be a God to find it
so we settle for DuckDuckGo which supports it: duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Awebmasterhome.cn+%22carson%22&t=h_&ia=web Adding years also helps: duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Awebmasterhome.cn+%22carson%22+2011&ia=web with this we might be getting all possible results. Ciro went through all in 2011, 2012 and 2013 but no luck. Also fuck en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carson_City,_Nevada and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carson,_California :-)
Let's search tools.whoisxmlapi.com/reverse-whois-search for "carson" contained in any historic domain name. 10,001 lines. Grepping those, no good Wayback machine hits for those that also contain "johnny" or "show". Data at: raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/tools.whoisxmlapi.com_reverse-whois-search_carson.csv in case anyone want to try and dig...
Let's also search the fortuitously timed 2013 DNS Census.
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The Reuters websites Updated 2025-03-28 +Created 1970-01-01
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The Reuters article directly reported only two domains in writing:
But by looking at the URLs of the screenshots they provided from other websites we can easily uncover all others that had screenshots, except for the Johnny Carson one, which is just generically named. E.g. the image for the Chinese one is www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/assets/usa-spies-iran/screencap-activegaminginfo.com.jpg?v=192516290922 which leads us to domain activegaminginfo.com.
Also none of those extra ones have any Google hits except for huge domain dumps such has Expired domain trackers, so maybe this counts as little bit of novel public research.
The full list of domains from screenshots is:
This brings up to 8 known domain names with Wayback Machine archives, plus the yet unidentified Johnny Carlson one, see also: Section "Searching for Carson", which is also almost certainly is on Wayback Machine somewhere given that they have a screenshot of it.
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44 new CIA websites Updated 2025-03-28 +Created 2025-03-13 2025-03-28
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This is an update to the article: Section "CIA 2010 covert communication websites"
I found 44 new covert websites made by the CIA around 2010 bringing the total to 397!
Most websites were boring as usual, but one was slightly cooler: webofcheer.com is a comedy fansite featuring Johnny Carson, Charles Chaplin, Rowan Atkins (of Mr. Bean fame), The Three Stooges and some other Americans no one knows about anymore. There must have been a massive Johnny Carson amongst the contractors at that time, given that we previously also knew about alljohnny.com, a site dedicated fully to him! Both of these sites also serve as some of the earliest examples we've got so far, dating back to 2004 and 2005.
Figure 1.
2011 Wayback Machine archive of webofcheer.com
. Source.
Figure 2.
2011 Wayback Machine archive of webofcheer.com scrolled to show Johnny Carson
. Source.
Figure 3.
2004 Wayback Machine archive of alljohnny.com
. Source. This one was a previously known website featuring Johnny Carson.
Another cool discovery is that I found the Getty Images source of the Jedi boy on their Star Wars themed site starwarsweb.net: web.archive.org/web/20101230033220/http://starwarsweb.net/ The photo can still be licensed today as of 2025: www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/photo/little-jedi-royalty-free-image/172984439. I found it by searching for "jedi boy" on gettyimages.co.uk. The photo is credited to username madisonwi, presumably an alias of a photographer from Madison, Wisconsin. Inspired by this I reverse image searched and found the source of many other stock images from other websites, and I pinged their authors whenever I could locate them e.g. x.com/cirosantilli/status/1899750172260806711.
Figure 4.
Stock photo of a Jedi boy from Getty Images used on starwarsweb.net
. Source.
Figure 5.
2010 Wayback Machine archive of starwarsweb.net
.
There were two small advances that led to the discovery of new domains:
  • while looking for a way to procrastinate I decided to scrape justdropped.com/drops/ for fun. That website lists expired domain names and see if it would yield any new results.
    I had already scrapped other expired domain websites before and used that data, and I hoped that this one would provide some new domain hits, even though it had very large overlap with the other websites I had scraped domains from previously.
    Such domain name lists tend to contain all SCAM domains in existence, since those inevitably expire once the scammers are caught.
  • even more importantly, I noticed by chance that I was being too strict on a small part of my fingerprinting which was excluding a few good domains, by removing any hits that had multiple archives of the Communication mechanism
With those two new developments, I then kicked off my pre-existing search pipelines searching for domain names with the word news on them, an amazingly efficient heuristic because many of the websites were disguised as news aggregators, and after a few hours theses new hits emerged. A few of those also led to the discovery of new IPs which then led to new domains.
One entirely new IP range was found around fastnews-online.com from 208.93.112.105 to 208.93.112.125. There were many domain names with very promising names in the range, but unfortunately for some reason most didn't have Wayback Machine Archives so I didn't count them as hits as per my guidelines.
Figure 6.
2009 Wayback Machine archive of fastnews-online.com
.
Also the newly found todaysengineering.com at 208.254.38.39 appears to form an IP range with the previously known nejadnews.com at 208.254.38.56, but I couldn't find any other domains in the region with our current data sources.
Figure 7.
2011 Wayback Machine archive of todaysengineering.com
.
All other domains either slot into previously known IP ranges, or more commonly don't currently have a known IP, though they would likely just slot in existing ranges if we had better data.
Thanks to Jack Rhysider from the Darknet Diaries podcast for pointing me to the existing of the 2022 Reuters article that kickstarted my research on the subject!
One outcome of this update is that I've increased my jq level to better automate the maintenance of the hits.json file were I store all the known websites in JSON format. I love that tool so much, I managed to merge two JSONs with it removing duplicates and then sort the JSON as desired. Beauty.
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