Exsanguination Exploration

They are aware that western intelligence agencies believe that mobile phones represent people 1:1, allowing ISIS to deceive SIGINT collection by keeping a tainted phone in the wrong location.

Weeks before Islamic State militant Abdelhamid Abaaoud led the Nov. 13 terror attacks in Paris, French authorities thought he was holed up in northern Syria. Western Intelligence agencies pursuing Abaaoud had tracked him there using cell-phone location data and other electronic footprints

Using only proxies for measuring something allows people to game the system. Western intelligence agencies used SIGINT data as a proxy to “measure” the location of key ISIS Paris Op operatives. This made those agencies vulnerable to deception.

Islamic State accomplices located in Syria likely used phones and WhatsApp accounts belonging to Abaaoud and other attackers to mask the group’s travel to Europe, said a Western security official: “We relied too much on technology. And we lost track.”

The advances in ISIS practices show how little encryption is relevant to the security of their terrorist operations. They rely more on fast flux and anonymity than on encryption.

They’re using anonymity as much as they use encryption, because encryption can attract the attention of intelligence services,” said Jean-Charles Brisard, president of the Center for the Analysis of Terrorism, a Paris-based think tank. “It’s a huge challenge.

This is the same principle at work: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-09-09/wells-fargo-opened-a-couple-million-fake-accounts

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