WikiLeaks Posts Mysterious 'Insurance' File

hello, i know this may be off topic but i downloaded the file but when i try to open it to see if i can possibly do anything against it (probly not but its worth a shot) i get a message " Windows cant open this file: insurance.aes256 to open this file, windows needs to know what program you want to use to open it. windows can go online to look it up automatically, or you can manually select from a list of programs that are installed on your computer." but when i look online i dont find anything, any help or ideas?

reply to post by DEATHHAWK008


Hello!

According the header, it's encrypted with openssl. You can decrypt it, if you know the password, using openssl commandline, like:
openssl aes-256-cbc -d -in insurance.aes256 -out insurance.decrypted

It will ask for the password, and if correct, it will result in a file named "insurance.decrypted". You have to look into the header of the decrypted file to identify it. I'm not sure if it's cbc mode aes though.

I'm just wondering if wikileaks will ever post the password. You know... If it's an "insurance", they may keep it buried.

I think we should start cracking the pass ourselves, in a distributed way. Anybody who will contribute with setting up a webpage to coordinate this project?



[edit on 2-8-2010 by nooyb]

Originally posted by hadriana
Could be that a 3 letter already has a key and knows what is in it.

If it is really messed up stuff, might even put such an agency or the people that have access in said agency.....in a position to make a judgment call.

Or it could just be the truth about Obama's mother, his birth, and his Harvard papers showing that HE himself is CIA.

Xfiles. Yeah.

Well, the truth IS out there.

HELL YEAH !!!! The NSA doesn't release algorithms it doesn't have a
method to break it with! Schor's algorihm to factor integer numbers
is a brute force type system used within Quantum Cryptography:

en.wikipedia.org...

Which might be usable on Quantum computers developed at Darpa,
SRI, PARC, IBM/Microsoft Research, DWave or any number of places
that do R&D on quantum computers for code-breaking.

My own suggestion is to find and store "Output Spacing" measurements
that compare the positions of SPECIFIC TYPES of output text that was
encoded with KNOWN KEY SEQUENCES and KNOWN plaintext.

If those key sequences and outputs are mapped onto a big enough
graph, you'll find sine wave, square-wave or sawtooth peaks & valleys
(i.e. Periodicity) that correspond to specific distributions of
ASCII/UNICODE values of text/numbers/punctuation that are
a specific (and periodic) distance apart from another when a
preceding or subsequent KEY or PLAINTEXT character are
in close proximity to another during the encrypt process.

Cross-reference the encode key input with the periodic nature
of the DISTANCES between certain sequences of output text
and one can ESTIMATE which SERIES of ASCII/UNICODE
characters MIGHT BE the correct encode sequence. Then use
a dictionary attack to find LOGICALLY POSSIBLE characters
to substitute within the found locations of what should be
vowels, consonants and/or numeric value types.

One MIGHT get lucky enough to "key" into a specific sub-range
of encode key sequences and lengths that would have LIKELY
been used to encrypt the entire or portions of the plaintext.

THis method is quite a bit brute force because you have to pre-compute
and correspond multiple input keys and key-lengths with KNOWN plaintext
so that a comparison/cross-reference may be made.
The storage of the pre-computed items would be ENORMOUS
BUT the big advantage is that a Binary search is FAST if the
pre-computed results are all in sorted ASCII/UNICODE order!

With an agency (the NSA) whose IT budget is 2+ billion dollars
a year, me thinks they could afford to pre-compute and store attobytes
of pre-computed encode keys and plaintext for cross-reference purposes.

blah please delete

[edit on 2-8-2010 by Frakkerface]

Originally posted by DEATHHAWK008
hello, i know this may be off topic but i downloaded the file but when i try to open it to see if i can possibly do anything against it (probly not but its worth a shot) i get a message " Windows cant open this file: insurance.aes256 to open this file, windows needs to know what program you want to use to open it. windows can go online to look it up automatically, or you can manually select from a list of programs that are installed on your computer." but when i look online i dont find anything, any help or ideas?

You're probably not going to wanna use window$ for that.
a Linux distro. is what youd want.

but, if you didnt already know that,
chances are, even if you had Linux,
the farthest you would get is fed up.

even people who do have some idea can still get nowhere,
the attempts are futile, mate. lol

let's just hope it is really 'juicy'
and the alphabet agencies of the united snakes back off.

if they back off,
the file did what i think it was meant to.
and that is all We need.

Ok, I received a reply to my email from WikiLeaks.

It reads:

---

Hang in there , you almost got it!

Best ones :-)
---

It would appear to me that they WANT this file cracked.

reply to post by freedommusic


You're getting close to cracking the code ?

Wouldn't it be great if someone found out the contents of this now famous insurance file... Ah, we can still dream =)

Peace !

Originally posted by freedommusic
Ok, I received a reply to my email from WikiLeaks.

It reads:

---

Hang in there , you almost got it!

Best ones :-)
---

It would appear to me that they WANT this file cracked.

niice!

hmm.. interesting....

reply to post by Illusionsaregrander


I know I come off as pretty crazy. To be honest I've been involved in another forum that has completely gone the way side. They used to care about things that ATS is talking about.

I am not trying to push an agenda. Firstly, I know that Wayne Madsen is not citing any real sources. He was also singled out along with John Young by Assange a few years back when they were starting wikileaks.

Right now, the head of the DoD, Robert Gates and the JCoS Adm. Mullen both released statements recognizing Wikileaks as legitimate. This, to me, is profoundly against our national policy of dealing with autonomous people that have something that we want. We usually see terrorists holding hostages and they make demands and we say "We don't negotiate with terrorists."

Now, we have an Australian, long time hacker, telling the United States of America to come clean about what they have done. He does not represent any state, or faction, or even a terrorist group. Instead he represents a group of people who believe in anonymity over the Internet. They have figured out how to "string" along the U.S. government. Now I want to believe that Assange is "good." I just have to be skeptical for these reasons.

None of this raises any flags to you?

Now, for a second, just think of what the best way to collect the world's secrets would be? I think I can tell you how I would do it.

This wouldn't be your run of the mill cover for the agent doing the collecting. Wikileaks has been around for a few years with some notable and verifiable material that had results. Nothing to the point of condemnation by our Government.

Next move is waiting until you catch the big one. Once you do make the catch, you release it in an agenda driven form. We aren't seeing the diplomatic cables, nor the Iraq war tracking, but instead... the Afghan Diary, which in itself has been heavily edited into browseable format and missing a quarter of it's original documents. To the public (and the 3 newspapers), simply because if it's size and scope it seems sensational. However, any person who has been following the war was not able to bring any new issues to light with the release of these leaks (sort of the whole point behind "leaking" although transparency could be a solid motive as well.)

Now, being that they are in the media spotlight, and being addressed in PR form by our government, they have more power then they ever could have had as simply an "anonymous" leaker website. Assange is making money, that much we know.

So how hard could it be? For our intelligence agencies to conduct this type of false flag operation. I would say it's pretty easy. Hosting a server in a northern European state to collect intel secrets on the world and potentially collect our intel that we never wanted to get out. Seems at least highly plausible.

reply to post by freedommusic

Lol...I think they are being encouraging with a bit of condescension mixed in...

I'm still impressed that they responded...and perhaps I am wrong...

Originally posted by schuyler
The size of the file puzzles me. It's just so huge.

There can be multiple explanations for that:
a) the file contains a hidden operating system, to improve security of the data included.
b) it contains 30 minutes of video

Here is Phillip Adams a listed board member on Wikileaks. The aricles he's referenced as writing are straight jibberish... They are inserted articles of basically nothing.

jmm.aaa.net.au...

Not content with her father’s enthusiasm for secular Jewry, Rebecca was determined to become a religious Jew. So the process of conversion that began in a liberal Synagogue in San Francisco was concluded long after she decided not to marry Lerner, in New York. When she phoned me from New York to tell me she’d signed up, she asked if her Dad, the notorious atheist, was upset. “Not as upset as if you’d become a Methodist.”

www.abc.net.au...

Phillip's relationship with his mother's new partner was so bad that Phillip celebrated when the man finally died. "My mother and I took everything he owned and burned them in the incinerator in the back yard - his shoes, his photographs... his lodge apron, everything. It was a very happy little funeral pyre. We did everything but dance around it... and after a while, he was gone."

The probable best "hack" is entering him in the Member and Office of the Order of Australia

www.itsanhonour.gov.au...
www.itsanhonour.gov.au...

Here is his list of films lol @ "The Getting of Wisdom."

His films include The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, The Getting of Wisdom, Don's Party, Lonely Hearts and We of the Never Never. Adams' Australia was part of BBC TV's contribution to Australia's bicentennial celebrations. Other TV programs include two series of The Big Questions with Professor Paul Davies, and Death and Destiny, filmed in Egypt with Paul Cox.

The fact that Robert Gates is even giving Assange the time of day with that kind of credibility on Wikileaks website is amazingly stupid. Gates is career CIA. I can't believe that he would not know how this makes him loook.


[edit on 2-8-2010 by nonamousely]

Originally posted by buddhasystem
b) it contains 30 minutes of video

Just 30 minutes?? Nah 1.4 gig can hold a lot more vid than that depending on the file type used, don't ask me exactly how I know but 700mb can give you a good quality feature length movie in something like a .avi, .mpeg or .mp4...

So already you could be looking at maybe 5 hours?? Also the resolution could be lower, compression could be higher.... Really it's hard to say how much video you could fit in that file but even 15 hours is not impossible I would think.

> Nah 1.4 gig can hold a lot more vid than that

Uh, let us not forget ladies and gentlemen this file is 1.4 GIG COMPRESSED w/ 7zip.

When extracted it will be an order of magnitude larger.

If everything is legit. eg: It's aes256 encrypted and 7zip compressed and there is all valid content inside.

Right now I have no reason to think otherwise.

Here is how I think the file was created.

1) 7zip into archive
2) encrypt using AES256 salted

Im not showing any compression on the file inside. It appears to be a encrptyed hard drive or usb flash drive. I would say its something like this.

www.thinkgeek.com...

encrypted with 256-bit AES, using randomly generated keys encrypted with a SHA-256 hash of your device password. All of this data is then doubly encrypted with 128-bit AES hardware encryption.

10 incorrect password attempts, and the encryption chip self-destructs, making the contents of the flash drive totally unreadable.

Seems wikileaks is makeing flash drive image copy without the password in order to bypass the security of the flash drive self destruct. One of his friends is Daemon as in daemon tools pro cd dvd image drives.

Software such as AESCrypt will give you a password screen on regular windows.

www.aescrypt.com...

[edit on 2-8-2010 by JBA2848]

> Im not showing any compression on the file inside

How can you tell?

I ran 7zip on a file and then encrypted it w/ aes256 salted and I couldn't tell if there is compression as the encryption obfuscates it.

reply to post by JBA2848


That is a very interesting idea about using the internet public in an attempt to bypass the hardware encryption on one of those IronKeys. Just a couple of points though.

- Firstly can you even extract the a file stored on one of those things without the hash key?? Something tells me that's the point in the hardware encryption, a hurdle before you can even think about attacking the actual file.

- And that idea doesn't really fit with the whole 'insurance' idea... That would imply they know exactly what the file contains and if the poo poo hits the whurly gig any number of people can simply release the key into the wild and of course in to the eager hands of the people that have made the effort to DL the file and monitor events.

Originally posted by JBA2848
Im not showing any compression on the file inside. It appears to be a encrptyed hard drive or usb flash drive. I would say its something like this.

www.thinkgeek.com...

encrypted with 256-bit AES, using randomly generated keys encrypted with a SHA-256 hash of your device password. All of this data is then doubly encrypted with 128-bit AES hardware encryption.

10 incorrect password attempts, and the encryption chip self-destructs, making the contents of the flash drive totally unreadable.

Seems wikileaks is makeing flash drive image copy without the password in order to bypass the security of the flash drive self destruct. One of his friends is Daemon as in daemon tools pro cd dvd image drives.

Software such as AESCrypt will give you a password screen on regular windows.

www.aescrypt.com...

[edit on 2-8-2010 by JBA2848]

Unless you have the key, you can't "see" the file inside to tell if it is compressed or not... And this has nothing to do with a hardware encrypted flash drive.
Something like TrueCrypt would allow you to create a virtual drive/volume inside an encrypted file, but I think the consensus is that OpenSSL is the tool used here.

I'm sure everyone is dying to know what is inside, but for those of us that are not intimately familiar with encryption application/use/techniques/etc, just sit back and leave it to the experts/hackers.

Some Hints:

- You can't open it in notepad/Word or anything else to peek inside. That's the whole reason encryption was created - to hide info from being easily discovered.
- If you don't even know what program to use to try and guess a key, you will get nowhere with this!
- If you don't know how to use Linux, just stop now.
- If you have never used encryption, just stop now. (Unless you are prepared to do research and learn a lot before posting)


Hackers love a challenge, and I'm sure they will be playing with this, but AES is a solid/proven encryption, so I don't really think they will get anywhere though. We just need to wait until the key gets out (If it ever does...). If we're lucky, someone (who knows how to use the proper tools to decrypt this) might be able to guess the key, but only if Assange intended for it to be easy to guess.

If the key does get out, I'm sure the decrypted contents will be available for download, as well as instructions on how to decrypt the file you have downloaded. Until then, just sit on that file and wait...

(Note: I know enough about encryption to know that this is above my head and will be taking my own advice and waiting it out.)

[edit on 2-8-2010 by CommandoJoe]

reply to post by Now_Then


Take this program. VirtualDub is free software, released under the GNU General Public License. Early release of this program are banned because they completely bypasses microsoft DRM protection.

Or the one mentioned earlier Daemon tools pro all virus software consider it a virus and deletes it from your harddrive not because its a virus but because it has copy protection software hacks.

> but only if Assange intended for it to be easy to guess.

That is the only possibility of opening the file. Otherwise, it isn't going to be opened by us and we wait for the key to be released.