One thing that’s interesting on joining the cyber industry is that since it deals in the invisible and ephemeral, we don’t have a lot of physical artefacts to explain our mission and heritage.

To understand and help make our threat actor opponents “more real” it’s interesting to look at who they were, how were they recruited and trained, what animates them? Here’s a small selection of items from the Stasi that speak to aspects of this.

Stasi chief Erich Mielke killed a Police sergeant in 1931 but went on to be chief of intel for over thirty years to 1989. The cheesy wooden stein is from his office.

His head of foreign intelligence Markus Wolf “the man with no face” was rarely pictured but apparently had a sense of humour.
These beer mats were designed by him and feature cats in “hear no evil” poses or releasing bugs (get it?) from a box.

The badges are from KGB and Stasi technical colleges, and the EhrenTeller (honorary award plate) is from a 1973 graduate of the Stasi’s Juristiche Hochschule (legal college) at Potsdam.

There they learned a version of law that told them shooting escapees at the border was OK, and you could secretly try and jail people.

A highly technically sophisticated but ruthlessly authoritarian regime is a warning from history. And as cyber people, we should also be mindful that much of the tech we create and administer is “dual use” capable for state surveillance.

#cybersecurity #espionage #coldwar #spycraft #vintageespionage

It’s nearly 34 years since the Berlin Wall came down and I remember it like it was recent history. In June I was in Berlin visiting the wall, former Stasi sites, and finding more items for the Cold War / Cyber Espionage museum.

On the other side of the world in Sydney Australia that collection is taking shape.

Here’s some items including:
- a huge surveillance camera off the wall, a searchlight and a siren
- border / warning signs incl from Gleinicke (bridge of spies)
- hand carved wood Stasi EhrenTeller (honorary award plate)
- uniform and personal effects of the head warden from the Stasi women’s prison at Hoheneck

#cybersecurity #coldwar #espionage #spycraft #vintageespionage

It was suggested to me I might be coming across as too much of a commie lover as I share so much KGB and Stasi kit.

Well (ahem) I just find opposition research rather fascinating - but your point is taken - so for balance here’s some Western spook radios.

Top right a classic WWII suitcase radio the British Mark III, bottom right a Mark 328 from about 1970 then a Mark 301 from the early 1950’s. GCCS (now GCHQ) had a big hand in designing earlier UK secret service radios.

Bottom left from West Germany the SP-15 from the 1950’s, a very successful radio, it was replaced by (bottom centre in green) the SP-20, then that in turn by models used across NATO.

Top left a 1940’s CIA RS-1 or GRC-109 these were superseded by the RS-6 a very nice cosmetic example here, and top centre we have the CIA RS-224, all these in beautiful CIA “dark side matt black”.

Enjoy

#cybersecurity #coldwar #espionage #spycraft #vintageespionage

I’ve been invited to show some spook toys at a cyber OSINT event and realised I can make packing easier by showing mainly tiny spook items. So here for your enjoyment are some analog-era badness in small form-factor.

There’s a Stasi wall bug, microdot/mikrats and special mikrat lens, hollow dice, small 1980’s CIA camera, a hollow coin and a coin with concealed blade, mini telescope, cyanide ampoule container, and a pigeon message carrier tube.

#cybersecurity #coldwar #espionage #spycraft #vintageespionage

Also shown for the first time at BSides Sydney tomorrrow is my Soviet Fialka (Violet) cipher machine.

Fialka has never been officially declassified by the Russians, and this is an exceptionally rare machine - I'm not aware of another one in the southern hemisphere.

When the wall came down the Soviets ordered their Warsaw Pact client states to destroy all the machines. The East Germans complied as did most other nations, but a small number of Polish machines escaped the furnace and here is one of those.

You could say Fialka is loosely based on Enigma in that it is an electro-mechanical machine with swappable rotors - but the comparisons end there - this is a far more sophisticated machine with many notable improvements.

First - there are ten rotors rather than 3-4, with every second one rotating backwards and in a far less predictable fashion. The machine has an integrated printer so could be used by a single operator where Enigma needed one person punching the keys in cleartext, and a second person writing down the lamps that lit up with the ciphertext. The daily key material is loaded with a punched card and it has an integrated baudot-style tape reader and punch so it can be used as a teleprinter / online cipher machine. Finally, in a really neat trick it includes what has become known as a "Magic Circuit" that enables use of some extraneous wiring in the rotors to allow a letter to be enciphered as itself - something not possible in Enigma and NEMA.

There are a couple of Fialkas in North America and of course Europe but I am thrilled to be able to bring a beautiful example to Australia to share with the infosec community here.

#cybersecurity #coldwar #espionage #spycraft #vintageespionage

I've been packing tonight for B-Sides Sydney tomorrow - we'll have some cracking toys to demo and show.

Also I did promise some vintage cipher machine goodness so here's the first one.

First off, a Swiss NEMA (sometimes called the Swiss Enigma as its based on the German machine) in perfect operating order. We can do a light tear down and some hands on demo on this unit. It's also in pristine condition as its a "War" machine meaning its one of the ones installed in a nuclear bunker in the early 1950s and it laid there unused for the best part of 40 years waiting for an apocalypse that never came.

NEMA's major improvement over Enigma is that it has four rotors but each one comprises two layers - a cipher ring like Enigma (so the wiring switches letters as the current goes through the rotor) but also a stepping ring that changes the order that the rotors advance when you press a key.

I've got a second NEMA on the way so we'll soon have them happily chatting away together for a more end to end demo scenario.

#cybersecurity #coldwar #espionage #spycraft #vintageespionage