U.S. Makes Cyberwar on Bin Laden

"I think the CIA has had some real successes in trashing bin Laden's accounts," said Ben Venzke, director of intelligence and special projects for iDefense, a risk assessment firm in Virginia.

According to U.S. government officials, bin Laden's early financial networks were anchored in Karachi, where he used Pakistani businessmen to spread his activities to the United Kingdom, South Africa and Mauritius.

The Saudi is known to have huge holding companies in Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands, U.S. government officials said.

Ferreting out bin Laden front men has been a major intelligence effort, according to one U.S. official, who told United Press International that bin Laden's financial and operational networks have been "completely mapped" in secret documents shared by the State Department, CIA and Treasury Department, with much of the mapping completed in detail by mid-1997.

When U.S. intelligence agencies have identified a specific source of bin Laden funds, U.S. hackers can enter the account and disrupt it by either deleting or transferring funds to other "friendly" accounts, said a source.

"Three key strokes, and it's gone," said one U.S. official. The money can be reduced to tiny fractions and shifted into U.S. accounts in such small numbers as to be virtually untraceable, this source said.

In some cases, the attacking agency merely distorts the data because destroyed data can be noticed, which can then call into action backup systems and redundancies, he said.

Venzke agreed. When the data is only distorted, the loss will be noticed only "over time" when the group tries to draw on the account. "The ideal attack is the one that isn't detected," said Venzke.

Internet Web sites proclaiming the Islamic Jihad have often offered avenues for U.S. hackers, according to Venzke.

U.S. officials told UPI that there were 155 to 200 Jihad sites on the Web that offer everything including instructions on how to become a mujahideen, get discount travel flights, prepare explosives and avoid security personnel. Some sites even provide databases showing where the committed can buy arms, including ammunition, along with their prices and offer bibliographies on articles dealing with guerrilla warfare and low-intensity conflict.

But Venzke said that many such sites also asked for contributions and offered bank route numbers and other places for militants to send money. The sites also provide information on drop shipments or detail places where supporters can send equipment for the cause. Expert hackers can use these pathways to penetrate the system.

Since 1994, bin Laden has used modern technology such as laptop computers, regular computers, faxes, cell phones, e-mails and the Internet to help set up his networks in Western Europe and 50 other countries, U.S. government officials said.

According to these officials, in one case, a senior bin Laden agent, an Egyptian militant, was working out of an apartment in a "city in northern Italy" and from another apartment just across the border in Switzerland. This man, who name was not given to UPI, acted as a kind of message center. With a fax machine and two phones lines, the agent received messages from bin Laden or senior operatives such as Ayman al-Zawahiri and relayed them to Amsterdam, Frankfort, and New York. There were also calls to Paris, Spain, Denmark and the United Kingdom, sources said.

All were attacked and blocked, sources said.

"Getting the phone number is the key to attacking the system," said a former U.S. intelligence official. "We certainly have the capability to either intercept the call and listen to it, or block it at the source."

The National Security Agency uses "watch lists" that contain key words, he said. Once those words are used in a conversation, the NSA system is alerted. According to Ben Venzke, if the call passes through a microwave transmitter, then the NSA has no problem: "It's the equivalent of a wire tap," he said.

But to counter his vulnerability to the NSA and America's superior electronic warfare resources, including Vortex satellites that vacuum up microwave transmissions, bin Laden has resorted to "the application of traditional tradecraft" to the Net world, Venzke said.

In the past, spies "hid micro dots in letters," he said. Today, bin Laden operatives hide encrypted messages "in the middle of a porno picture." or use chat rooms or other seemingly harmless venues to deliver covert orders.

The NSA/CIA listeners also face a difficult challenge to interception, thanks to the advent of landlines and fiber optics, said Venzke. "You can intercept a call as long as it goes through a central point," he said, but without that, "you face a whole series of different problems."

The CIA also faces a problem of personnel. According to Venske a lot of the old agency experts who practiced experienced tradecraft have retired, replaced by younger people "who lack the requisite technical skills."

The problem, he says, is identifying whom the message is going to. "If you're in Afghanistan, and you have a satellite phone, you can hook into anywhere on the Web. You may have a known sender and a message but how do you identify the 30,000 recipients?" asked Venzke. "It's just a text message, it has no electronic signature."

Human intelligence is the real answer, Venzke said, "someone deep in the network."