Mike Ritland
speaker
855 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Feb 2025
Mike Ritland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The Shawn Ryan Show · #164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare · 29 Jan 2025
podcast
It's just kind of, even if I didn't do any work for them, just that... Just being a small part of it. Yeah, exactly. But even just seeing it happen would have been enough for me to... kind of kickstart some things. It's another thing. How did that come across your radar? I mean, it was everywhere at the time. It was like in Wired and all these other places.
Like, 3D printed gun, you know, firing. Like, it's... Everyone can print a gun now, like, regardless of laws. And that's, you know, that was kind of the message going around in the press. This was also kind of another pivotal time when the NSA ant catalog. So Snowden happened around the same time. This is often...
incorrectly misattributed to him, but there were a lot of leaks that happened around that time, both with and without Snowden, that kind of opened my eyes to the level of games and just technology happening in computing. Yeah, I mean, I already knew a decent amount of it, but the Ant catalog,
Oh, man, that had, it was just like, you know when you're growing up and there's like the spy tools in the back of the magazine, you know, disappearing ink and, you know, all those things. This was like that on crack, dude. It was like, they had a malicious cable in there. This cable, when was it? It was leaked in 2013. The catalog was...
Dated 2008, and they were announcing in 2009 they would have these cottonmouth cables... available for, you know, purchase to their ecosystem of, you know, whoever they sell to in the NSA. The price on those, I think it was a minimum order quantity of 50 with a $20,000 per cable price tag. It's like, wow, amazing.
But, you know, it had all these electronics inside, a radio inside, and that was cool. And actually, yeah, pull this up again. So, Cottonmouth, this is the page out of the catalog where it shows, it's really chunky cable, like really, really thick hood, but they sandwich a whole bunch of different PCBs inside of this thing. And, you know, that stuck in my head, obviously. So what does that do?
They weren't super specific about the exact capabilities, but, you know, it had a radio. It had some ability to manipulate USB. I mean, I would... Based on all of my reading in here, the latest generation OMG cable is basically a dead match to its capabilities from what can be deciphered from this page. So all the way down to like covert exfiltration and stuff like that.
That's a good question.
It's more of a capabilities thing, like getting through and breaking security effectively. I would imagine this gets implanted into spaces that are higher security. If you can't just walk in and do stuff, if you can't do the easy things, you're going to start having to use these types of tools to get into a place, have somebody plant a cable, and then you've got remote access.
There were a lot of other tools in this space. like, implanted video cables that you would implant on a monitor so you could remotely read what's being displayed on the monitor. Lots of cool tricks like that. Some were long-range, some were short-range, but all kinds of crazy spy gear that would allow...
impressive capabilities that very few people in the private civilian space even consider defending against.
Yeah, I forget if there was ever a mention of what Ant stands for, but it was just this leaked catalog with all of the different... It was a leaked catalog. Yeah, somebody leaked it. A lot of people say it was from Snowden, but if you actually trace it back, it wasn't. It was never at least attributed to Snowden.
Yeah, that just came out, and you get to look at the amazing spy gear that is out there.
Definitely those video cables. I'm trying to remember all the different things. We can pull it up, actually. But, yeah, you want to pull it up right now? I can pull it up on the internet. Pull it up. Sweet. All right, cool. So, yeah, let's go through just a few of the pages of the band catalog. I haven't done this in a while, so I'm a little rusty.
But, yeah, so let's look at just the hardware stuff. We got... Let's see, what is this? This is a short to medium range implant for RF transceiver. This is a component that adds RF to one of the other pieces they have in here, which they call a digital core, to provide a complete implant. So it's kind of like a customizable, build your own, what kind of implant do you need?
They've put this into various pieces of hardware. There's actually, I think it's over here, Here's kind of another implant. They call this Thief. Lux Rabbit. It's a hardware implant designed specifically for Dell PowerEdge servers. Like a specific one hooks to... It's called a JTAG debugging interface. Basically, a lot of hardware has a debugging interface.
If you get access to that electrically, you can do a whole bunch of stuff. You can implant things at a really low level on that machine. They give you all kinds of access, right? It gives you lots of data. So if you've got an implant that goes into there and hooks up to it, you've got permanent access. Similar to what I was describing with the USB cable,
uh with that that covert exfiltration mechanism um but this is baked into the machine so i would imagine the way this happens is during mailing interdiction so you know dell ships a server over to the customer right and our government knows this is happening they grab it in the mail
crack it open, put one of these inside, close it back up, send it off to the intended target, and now they've got long-term access inside there. Even if they wipe everything, like down to the hard drives, put new hard drives in, you can still get it right back in. They would have to crack everything open and look at all the hardware to find this type of stuff. Really cool.
Really cool types of hidden plants.
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