Enron emails inspire GCHQ spooks

Geeks at GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), the UK's spook-infested listening station, are using the infamous Enron email trail to develop software that will monitor people's emails and stop them sending incriminating or confidential messages. The first findings from the research will be presented in August by Neil …

[Dillon Pyron]

Encryption

If you really want to get a message out, just encrypt it.

[frank denton]

er, no

Encrypted e-mail sticks out like a sore thumb, because montoring apps can't read it. Hence the alarms go off in monitoring land. What you do is wait until you get home and use your private e-mail address if you want to slag off your company/colleagues, pass on dubious jokes etc.

[Da Andersson]

Encryption? Nope, well - erhmmm, yes - but differently.

The corporate network/installation should not allow for alien softwares but...

If you want to hide anything, there is something called steganography - including encrypted data/message in an otherwise harmless picture.

An e-mailed picture will not stick out and it's much more power consuming to scan all e-mailed images for graphical irregularities. And if you spot any, is it encrypted data or just "noise" in the picture.

You can of course ban peeps sending emails containing graphical images but hey! Why not banning e-mail to external recipients totally?

At some point, we have to start treating the staff as people and realize that we can't protect the corporations from data leakage - or Govt departments.

//DA

[Danny]

Broken Calculator

"The system is now being run on 32 IBM HS21 high-density, dual-processor, dual core Blade Servers, which gives it 68 processors and 128 cores..."

That would be 64 processors, surely? (and don't call me Shirley)

[heystoopid]

Actually

Actually encrypt the message within several pictures , so that software will only see a picture but not the message , and unless one has the original picture to compare against bit by bit to dig out the encrypted data from within the data stream , it cannot find the message hidden within or so it would seem!

Beside which , this wanker has obviously forgotten much about the capability of modern digital technology and the power of the current home PC(which can easily decrypt old flash high speed U-boat messages sent in the last war which sadly the Bletchley Park machine of the same era , could not do even on a good day! co-ordinated Huffduff stations would give an approximation of last position of transmission sent to allow the radar equipped long range Liberator B24 patrol aircraft to do the rest) , one can only presume to assume his brain has been disassembled and has a large number of vacancies left upon reassembly

Oh well back to the drawing board! , No. 5 is alive!

[PH]

Stealth mail wrapper

Me, if I'm passing something outbound and I want to mask it I simply zip the file then manually change the file extension to .jpg and then attach it to a mail. Personally, I've never ever had that method blocked.

[Hugh McIntyre]

Learning the wrong lesson?

Maybe I'm misremembering, but wasn't the fraud first discovered via a whistleblower from inside the company? In which case preventing people disclosing such frauds in the future may not be the best thing?

Granted there are other information leaks people genuinely want to prevent. But it's hard to stop one and not the other.