Your printer leaves a trace of microscopic dots on the paper that can give you away

On By Garmin Philip

Year 2017. The Intercept, a media specialized in power and research inspired by Snowden, receives some internal NSA documents —The United States National Security Agency— by a leaker, with some excerpts censored. Those physical documents, received by post, revealed part of Russia’s plans to influence the presidential elections that boosted Trump a few months ago. The media scanned those documents and published them along with the news they prepared, a way to reinforce their veracity and credibility, presumably assuming that in no way could anyone attribute the leak to a specific person.

They were wrong.

The printer Reality Winner used was the one who gave her away.

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A 15 x 7 matrix

Machine Identification Code From Printers

The FBI, after a swift investigation of documents published by The Intercept, went to arrest Reality, who admitted his guilt and was sentenced to five years in prison. Reality worked for a private security company with accreditation to access these documents. Before that, he was part of the United States Air Force. His ideology, contrary to Donald Trump, motivated her to filter the document.

She decided to print it out and take it with her to a safe place where she could mail it, something the FBI sensed when they found there were fold marks on the paper. What the filter did not know is that the printer left microscopic yellow dots on the document that revealed the exact moment the document was printed. A 15 x 7 matrix (105 dots) used to record the day, date and time of printing, and the printer model used. Once the FBI saw this data, they just had to check who had access to these documents at the time and go for Reality.

Printermarkrp

The existence of this microscopic fingerprint on the part of printers is known and disseminated for a long time by entities such as the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), which until 2015 was registering the exact models that verified that these dot matrixes left, but that as of 2017 he limited himself to pointing out that practically all printers on the market do so in one way or another, with or without yellow dots.

Even those that until recently they themselves marked as clean. In other words, in that sense none of them is to be trusted, as all major manufacturers, according to the EFF, have agreements with governments to ensure that prints are traceable using this technique.

One way to check if our printer is marking our printed sheets with one of these codes is scanning the document back, and applying the color inversion. Although it may be insufficient. There’s also online tools aimed at unmasking this dot matrix if we send you a scanned file at 600 dots per inch resolution.

This practice, however, is not new either. Already in World War II hidden codes were used in documentation sent by spies to reveal information that could not be detected by the country from which it came. Only now we have the spy at home.

Images: Wikimedia.



Reference-www.xataka.com