Lots of conjecture in the comments about how he got caught. Too bad nobody read the article.
Web-based generative AI tools/chatbots
…
he created fake AI CSAM—but using imagery of real kids.
All the privacy apps in the world won’t save you if you’re uploading pics to a cloud service.
And…that’s still not how he got caught. He hit a child porn honey pot and they got his IP.
I would have assumed all his AI work was local on his own server.
Fuck this human
Tldr; Asshole used encrypted everything and Tor to create and spread csam. Government isn’t disclosing how they caught him
He didn’t use encrypted everything. He had a public telegram group chat in which he stored a lot of his material. Which, as many people in the comments on the article pointed out, is not encrypted, but is presented by telegram as if it is. That’s likely how they caught him.
To be clear, it’s encrypted*.
* If you enable it
Telegram groups are not E2E.
Chats are encrypted, but the servers hold the encryption keys (I believe).
There are one-to-one chats that are full e2e, but you have to enable it. And it has all sorts of compromises.
Qualifier: this is as dicumented by telegram. Since it’s not open source, we can’t really verify it
Recent events have taught me that only individual chats are encrypted*. Group chats don’t have that feature.
In telegram nothing is e2e encrypted unless you specifically ask it to be and when you do, it kills all the functionality that makes it better than others.
That’s what I said. The person I replied to said that all messages are encrypted* with the asterisk being only if you specifically enable it. I clarified that it doesn’t apply to group chats though. I don’t use Telegram so the loss of functionality is actually a bigger deal to me than the argument around E2EE. Can you explain what features are lost when you enable it? It’s a messaging app so I’m curious what you sacrifice for E2EE.
There is no point in encrypting a public group chat since anyone can join and decrypt it anyway.
If you distribute encrypted materials you also need to distribute a means of decryption. I’m willing to bet a honeypot was used to trick him into distributing his csam right to the government hinself.
True. Or it could have been a backdoor in his phone, or the full running browser in his sim card, or the backdoor into his CPU chips… Maybe they do old fashioned police work for these cases and only use the pegasus spyware for others?
Pretty silly to do anything illegal on a computer when we know how flawed they are, imo
Hey, could I get some info on the
Full running browser in his SIM card
Thing?
I’m quite curious and haven’t been able of finding anything on the internet about it
Neither Tor nor end-to-end encrypted messengers will cover the endpoints. It’s possible that they caught him using good old fashioned detective work. You don’t need a software back door for that.
Tor was created by NSA, half of Tor servers are run by NSA, not that secure
Tor was created by the Naval Research Labs, and was released to the public because it is secure.
The problem is that if it’s only the CIA or DIA using it, it’s easy figure out who is using it and where. Make it global and now there is a lot of noise to separate out.
Yeah, the security of tor relies on the nodes being different, but when most of them are owned by the same person/government body the security go downhill, sadly i2p isn’t that popular, because every person is a node
Tor was created by the NRL, which is a part of the US Navy and Marine Corps.
Meh, I heard wrong them sorry
Please don’t talk about child predators, and use the term “back door” in the same sentence. It ain’t right…
we’re talking about encryption here, not…that. please get your mind out of the gutter
It’s better they don’t disclose it and catch more people doing the same.
I’m all for transparency but if that means less caught child molesters, I’m ok with a little obfuscation, even from the fucking pigs.
Does this go to show that authorities needing backdoors to everything in order to do their jobs is actually kind of nonsense?
Yeah, it does. Perfect opsec is impossible even with encryption.
Heard about a guy doing insane opsec when selling on the dark web (darknet diaries podcast).
In the end he got busted because a trusted member if his operation got lazy and ignored his rulesEdit: This guy was essentially
Leeching internet via a directional antenna from a neighbour that was significantly away
Not allowing any visitor in with a cell. You had to keep it outside
All drug related actions are done in a cleaned down room.
Tripple sealing dark marketplace orders, wiping everything down with corrosive fluids to destroy any sort of dna material
Not going to the same post office in (I believe 6 months) and only sending of 3-6 shipments at onceI hope I got it correctly. Please go listen to the episode: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/132/
Reminds me of the lulzsec leader dude who exposed himself by logging into IRC once without tor on.
Then he folded instantly and became an informant for the FBI to stay out of jail lol.
In the end its really about tradeoffs. You can’t be an expert in everything so you need a team if you want to do anything big, but Cyber criminals are still criminals. They don’t trust each other which is what ultimately leads to their downfall even if they do all the implementation and tech part right.
Some German guy got got for logging into IRC via encrypted wifi, the cops did some war driving and correlated timing of traffic spikes with IRC messages until they had a profile with better hit probability than a DNA match.
The best thing about that? They didn’t even need a search warrant as our genius was broadcasting the side-channel to the whole neighbourhood.
That’s sounds mostly correct.
His relative also admitted their involvement and flipped on him which destroyed the narrow avenue he had to throw out the original evidence for the warrant.
Of course we only ever hear the cases of people who get caught. If he relative hadn’t gotten lazy he may never have been caught.
The lesson there is not to involve other people.
The article is exaggerating the guy’s setup way too much. Opsec doesn’t end at the application level… The OS (the most popular being in bed with US), ISP, tor nodes, Honeypot VPNs, so on and so on could leave a trail.
Using telegram public groups and obfuscating a calculator as a password protection layer is hillbilly level of security.
And i’m glad these fuckos don’t have the knowledge to go beyond App developers marketing.
It seems irrelevant whether this person is using encrypted channels if they failed to maintain anonymity. If they distributed material and leaked any identifying info (e.g. IP address), then it would be trivial for investigators or CIs to track them down.
It sounds like he created material, not only AI but actual children then distributed it. The tools to track down the creators of CASM is only getting better.
A single legal image of any of those children posted to social media is going to allow algorithms to make the match and its routine detective work from there.
It only takes one child to talk. No amount of encryption is going to stop that.
In the list of apps he was using I don’t see any mention of a VPN. How much you want to bet he raw dogged it with encrypted apps over the clearnet so it was trivial to leak his real IP address
He posted the AI filth to a “public server”, so I’m willing to bet his plan was just full of holes. I don’t mind pedos getting taken down, buy I do mind encrypted software being owned by the government - any government.
i watched some documatnary about hackers, and usually, they catch them because they talk way to mouch about themselves.
This dude wasn’t a hacker by any stretch
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Likely, data may have been encrypted but he may have leaked compromising metadata. Even more likely it was bad operation security linking a personal identity to his anonymous persona.
I’m always thankful for incompetent criminals.
It’s all publicly approved backdoors until feds are planting child abuse imagery on your PC because you spoke out against them in the wring venue. No one will believe you when they do. Currently you can’t trust articles like this, maybe the dude was actually hurting kids. Maybe the feds just needed a win. You won’t ever know, and neither will I so long as the same ideology is in control. Now watch them turn every single kid in the pics into a sex offender because the fed believes if you were raped, you WILL rape someone in the future. But by all means keep enjoying their rage bait.
The replies to your comment glow so bright
Are you ok?
Are you a dumbass?
Damn, thats weird. Are you mentally ill or st?
Well, this person (according to their post history) has schizophrenia, but this could kinda be real and probably also happned, if not recently, probably sometime in history. Of course the stereotype about rape victims actually exists.
Prison is too good for anyone who keeps child sex abuse images.
WHO is downvoting you???
People like me, who are against the death penalty on principle. (or even more “creative” forms of punishment people like to come up with in these cases).
No, prison is where this guy belongs. For as long as necessary.Death penalty is fine if it didn’t get abused bit it will be abused. We know this. So yes i agree with you.
But also if cop killed him and there is adequate evidence that athat person actually hurt a child. I just see self defense and if I was no a jury, I would not convict and I hate police lol
Society lost this basic function for self cleansing. At some point these people just need to be disposed off.
Also, state will execute for treason. I look at severe child abuse as a higher order, ie social treason. FAFO
Maybe you should research a bit on how child abusers are treated in prison.
So what do you recommend, Siberia?
Stalin era gulag style please
This whole thing is horrifying, but the last paragraph is especially disturbing:
Since Herrera himself has a young daughter, and since there are “six children living within his fourplex alone” on Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, the government has asked a judge not to release Herrera on bail before his trial.
Even more disturbing is it said he was also producing content.
Where is the police brutality when you need it?!
The Ars article seems to suggest that they were able to crack his phones pretty easily, which is a bit scary. I don’t see anything about a computer.
Although it doesn’t appear he was actually using any encryption apps to store material; rather, he used a fake calculator app as password protection. Obviously not the brightest bulb in the drawer.
The Ars article seems to suggest that they were able to crack his phones pretty easily
Android uses data at rest encryption, which isn’t really useful without a lockscreen PIN/password since data gets decrypted after you unlock your screen the first time after each boot
Although it doesn’t appear he was actually using any encryption apps to store material; rather, he used a fake calculator app as password protection. Obviously not the brightest bulb in the drawer.
Agreed, he probably felt safe enough “hiding” the files. Definitely not the sharpest tool in the shed, which is great because fuck this guy
The material was allegedly stored behind password protection on his phone(s) but also on Mega and on Telegram, where Herrera is said to have “created his own public Telegram group to store his CSAM.” He also joined “multiple CSAM-related Enigma groups” and frequented dark websites with taglines like “The Only Child Porn Site you need!”
My guess would honestly be Telegram. For starters, they aren’t end-to-end encrypted by default, you have to turn it on. The only end-to-end encryption that Telegram offers is their “secret chats” which are only available between two users. Groups are not encrypted.
So telegram’s delusional propaganda did something good for once?
I honestly don’t think he really had any opsec apart from those few applications, look at what tools he was using, what a joke. Fake calculator app to store files are great to protect from your parents, not the FBI.
He was clearly using Android and I bet he was using the stock rom, kyc sim card, and not even a vpn behind tor.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy and relieved he was caught, but if he had done serious research and did a better opsec, it wouldn’t have been so easy for the authorities to get him
actually using a vpn with tor is not a good idea: https://support.torproject.org/faq/faq-5/
true but only if you do : tor > vpn
if you do : vpn > tor in this order, it’s way more resistant, because if the onion node is compromised, it’s the vpn’s ip address that is exposed, not yours
oh wow i didn’t know that!! thanx for clarifying :]
Lol, I still don’t know why people like CSAM :v
Lol, it’s a mental illness.
A lot of it out there and a lot of it was enabled by limp dick society. Looking at you cathlics… Fucking disgusting that you allowed your clergy to do this and even cover up for it. And when people spoke up you ostricized them. Pathetic social behavior.
Imagine when your clown social group is more important than children being raped.
Catholic church sure… But look at any religion.
Islam was founded by a pedobear and Muslim in straight up denial about what is going with child abuse while rich Arabs are traffic humans for funzies.
But that’s over there. Cathlic church is doing this within the US. All of major urban areas have extensive allegations of child abuse for decades. Nothing has been done.
Limp dick boomers would rather act like it never happens. Prosecutors and police are limp dick and too busy killing taxpayers lol
Happens in the other religions wasn’t ghandi raping 13 year old girls and everybody was like no big deal, big man earned his due with “peace” 🤡
Pathetic daddy worship enables this behavior
Milf porn is where it’s at. Speaking of which, I think I’m going to go find a cory chase video
But have you heard about big tittied Asian ladies🫢
saw a headline the other day about the gov’t tracking people on tor using Google ads
I’m still not entirely convinced that tor is as protected as people think it is.
There’s only something like 6,000 exit nodes. It really wouldn’t be that much money for the government to run thousands of them. If you monitor enough exit nodes and enough relays, you can start to statistically tie connections back together with timing analysis.
I don’t know this to be the case for sure but I can’t imagine the government hasn’t pushed towards breaking the security and identifiability of the tor network
I’ve suspected Tor of being heavily compromised for a while now. It’s already known that many onion sites are government honeypots, with sites being taken over rather frequently, sometimes without triggering the canary. While it’s better than nothing in some situations, I don’t think it can be relied upon for true anonymity anymore.
If you read a lot of news, it’s really clear Tor isn’t protecting anyone from the FBI. It’s about as effective as using limewire at this point. Which also, the reporting makes it pretty clear it’s not effective to hide criminal acts in the least. But it’s pretty great abusers think it’s effective so they get caught.
If you read the news it’s really clear people commit opsec mistakes - all it takes is one - and get caught.
The inciting thought of most criminal acts is ‘‘they’ll never catch me’’. Which if you’re as lucky as me, you’ll know you’ll get caught everytime, and they’ll make an example of you. It’s kept my nose clean a long time.
a heavy vehicle driver for the US military
That’s an odd way to describe a soldier. It’s not really surprising when violent people do violent things.
I’m not sure that’s necessarily true. There are plenty of military contractors out there, and a driver is the kind of position you would expect to be likely contracted out. That in no way makes one a soldier.
Plenty of contracting orgs do driving for the military. You don’t need a soldier, you need a trucker, so why use soldiers?
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Counterpoint: Those who produce and collect CP deserve to be in jail
