CIA websites so flawed that even an “amateur” could find them led to the deaths of dozens of assets in China and Iran, research has found.
Security experts with the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto conducted a study into a web of “covert” U.S. websites after being tipped off by a Reuters journalist. Using only information and material publicly available, the researchers found a network of 885 websites that can be measured with “high confidence” to have been used as covert communications websites for the CIA. The Chinese and Iranian governments discovered these websites in 2011 and 2012, using them to capture and execute dozens of assets, researchers said.
