Fake 'Star Wars' Fan Site Revealed To Be Part Of A CIA Intelligence Network
Image Source: Gamepressure.com
With the finale of Andor, there’s been plenty of talk about rebellion spy networks, but it turns out Star Wars played a role in a real-life spy story. Around 210, there was a website at the URL starwarsweb.net. This site was a front run by the CIA to communicate with each other secretly. At present, the website’s URL leads directly to the CIA website, but using The Wayback Machine shows what it looked like around 15 years ago. The site was convincing with images of the characters like the cartoon Yoda from Clone Wars and links to various news, sports, and games sites. The site was used to monitor several locations, chief among them the Middle East.
Unfortunately, this story has a tragic ending. Iranian authorities discovered the true nature of these sites, and from there, they discovered several related sites and used them to track down and kill agents. An explanation of the events from a 2018 Yahoo News article reads, “According to the former intelligence official, once the Iranian double agent showed Iranian intelligence the website used to communicate with his or her CIA handlers, they began to scour the internet for websites with similar digital signifiers or components—eventually hitting on the right string of advanced search terms to locate other secret CIA websites. From there, Iranian intelligence tracked who was visiting these sites, and from where, and began to unravel the wider CIA network.” The IP addresses of the linked sites were sequential, making them easy to identify for the Iranian authorities. While the spies in Andor would repeat the words “I have friends everywhere,” the unfortunate reality was that these CIA agents had enemies everywhere and met their end.
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Source(s): PC Gamer, The Nerdist
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