How Al Qaeda terrorists hid plans to attack Europe inside a PORN film

Al Qaeda terrorists hid more than 100 documents inside a porn video

THE UNBELIEVABLE true story of how religious extremists smuggled plans for terrorist attacks across Europe inside a porn film.

 

Terrorists are using increasingly elaborate methods to smuggle information around Europe.

For example, Al Qaeda extremists buried more than 100 documents which outlined terror plots across the European Union inside a pornographic film.

The porn video – laced with the terrorist documents – was stored on a memory disk which was confiscated by German security officials.

The technique is nothing new.

Intelligence agencies have been hiding documents within other files for hundreds of years, experts have claimed.

 

The process of concealing messages or information within other non-secret data is known as steganography.

The technique has been used to hide sensitive testimony by exploited workers or political prisoners from government officers.

Encrypted files are then stored on a smartphone and smuggled across the border, where even the customs' scanner won't be able to detect the hidden information.

 

Al Qaeda terrorists chose to hide their documents inside a porn video entitled 'Sexy Tanja'.

"The video would be easier to ship and distribute," said Professor of Criminology at California State University, Kenneth James Ryan.

"Whoever has ability to decrypt the code would be the intended audience."

Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science David Wagner said digital video files contain plenty of free space to hide electronic documents.

And steganography is no longer limited to professionals – commercially available software is now powerful enough to do it for you, Professor Wagner has cautioned.

 

Using steganography, this YouTube users hid the entire works of Shakespeare inside this photo

Al Qaeda will have stored the documents between the digital components of the video file.

Each pixel stored in a digital image – for example, an individual frame in a movie – has a number linked to it.

The steganography software works by either adding information into a file – which can increase the size of the document – or by modifying individual bits within the file.

For example, it is possible to tweak the last two bits of each byte of data within a large image format without making any perceptible changes to the photo.

But distributed in amongst these tiny bits of data in the image is a much larger, hidden file.

 

Special software is required to reverse engineer the process and extract the information.

According to CNN, it took German cryptologists months to break the code hidden within the explicit 'Sexy Tanja' film, which was first confiscated by police in Berlin on May 16 2012.

Austrian Maqsood Lodin, 22, had hidden the memory disk in his underpants when he returned from Pakistan via Budapest and Hungary.

Amongst the 100 documents found within the porn video were Al Qaeda plans to seize cruise ships as well as a number of lone gunmen attacks within Europe.

Writing at the time, German newspaper Die Zeit said one of the plots involved hijacking a passenger ship and using it to "pressurise the public."

No times, dates or places were listed within the hidden document.