Dear friends, does anyone here know of any rare Web2 phreaker-style attacks?
Officercia.ethThe thing is, I remember that there was some attack for which hackers grew quartz crystals in the form of needles, and then used them to physically inject into the Internet cable and intercept unprotected traffic.
I remember that such attacks were used against Bitcoin whales who did not use VPN and their home address was known.
I checked github.com/jlopp/physical-bitcoin-attacks/blob/master/README.md and airgapcomputer.org but had no luck…
I also was not able to find any information about it but I remember that I heard about it somewhere. Can you please help me? Thank you.
Wondering if that’s possible as well. From my point of view - theoretically, ofc yes… I remember also somehow a guy from bitcointalk was attacked this way…not sure.
What I was suggested:
The phreaker term made me recall the miriad of boxes that existed in the 80s (blue.box, red-box....) each trying to mimick some frequencies of the phone network or phone cabines.
Data over a network also have a type of frequency but the shielding of the network was rather poor a few years ago.
So a technique like the Van Eck that was around the time of CRT monitors could be applied on network.
I've found some cases of that usage for the HDMI cable and some references regarding "Van Eck phreaking" but couldn't find any POC on that last one»
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora;
- Van Eck device (looks like someone deleted entire search results on that topic!):
- Internet Tapping attack.
I’ve been reading about internet tapping today, scary thing. Exactly from the same time period…
- serverfault.com/questions/195878/how-to-detect-if-someone-is-tapping-your-isp-connection
- www.investopedia.com/terms/e/eavesdropping-attack.asp
- www.grandmetric.com/2022/08/01/lan-security-attacks/
- www.makeuseof.com/what-are-disassociation-attacks/
- youtu.be/PbipefyfkNY
I now understand where my idea came from. Just like agents used to tap the phone by tampering with a box on the street with a special device based on a Kingston flash drive (lol), now they want the same thing but with the Internet.
Apparently this is some kind of secret service thing…
That is, there is a clear logical connection, someone asked to do "to be like they did then with the phone" and something leaked to the network. Interesting…
On the opposite:
Researchers I asked about it told me that they don't think the attack would have been injecting quartz to the ethernet cable directly. IMO it would be more of a quartz electronic component, that's my hypothesis.
Since we are mentionning phreaking as the process to acheive the hack, I would assume that the crystals were used to make some type of new box to resonate/harmonize with the frenquencies on the network cable…
And a process to capture such electronic waves as in the old radio crystals set [you might see several projects on ham radio sites] or as I mentionned a Van Eck device. Both were very popular in the 80s/90s (the Van Eck was even used in a book: The Cryptonomicon)!