“Most of the time this happens the password is some quirky word related to the suspect’s area of interests or hobbies,” Hansen said.
Hansen recalled one case several years ago in which police in the United Kingdom used AccessData’s technology to crack the encryption key of a suspect who frequently worked with horses. Using custom lists of words associated with all things equine, investigators quickly zeroed in on his password, which Hansen says was some obscure word used to describe one component of a stirrup. ??2??
Relying on a word-list approach to crack keys becomes far more complex when dealing with suspects who communicate using a mix of languages and alphabets. In Operation Firewall, for example, several of the suspects routinely communicated online in English, Russian and Ukrainian, as well as a mishmash of the Cyrillic and Roman alphabets. ??3??
...”steganography,” which involves hiding information by embedding messages inside other, seemingly innocuous messages, music files or images. ??3??
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