Assassination Tools; The Mystery Unravels
A few things have come to light recently on the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Many new suspects have been identified via surveillance cameras, and as of today Dubai police have claimed a breakthrough using DNA to match the identification of at least one suspect in the assassination. Other details have also come through with the arrest in Syria of a top aid to Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in the guise of Muhammad Nasser, who was a top Hamas official. He has since been extradited to Dubai and has been undergoing questioning for his supposed role in identifying to the assassins when Mahmoud al-Mabhouh would be traveling to Dubai. Most of this has been going on this past week which is why I have not posted lately. I figured to wait and see where things would go internationally with the investigation, and decided instead to focus on some of the details of the operation itself that has not been discussed very much in the news. One of those issues is the speculation surrounding how the assassins got into the victims room. Since this key surveillance footage has not been shown, all we have is speculation on what actually took place at the critical moment of the operation itself. Questions continue to mount over why this hallway footage was available earlier in the day when the assassination surveillance team followed the victim to his room, but not available during the murder itself. Where is that footage and why are we not allowed to see it? Was the camera somehow disabled by the kill team prior? If so, and this footage does not exist, then all we have left is speculation on how entry to the room was achieved.
There are several methods that have been discussed already. 1. They managed to social engineer their way into getting the victim to open the door. 2. They used a door lock programmer to gain entry prior to the victim arriving back at his hotel room. No matter how it happened there is rather an easy way to gain entry for the team itself. And this is where assassination tools come in handy. Sometimes it is the easiest method as opposed to the sophisticated one that is used. And while we do know the team did in fact try to reprogram the lock, we do not know if this was successful or not. This is where we need the sophistication of someone who knows his trade, and also is one of the foremost experts in the world on lock picking and entry methods. That person is known in the trade as The Key, or Barry Wels.
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http://www.thecoldspy.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/tools.flvIn this video below we see how Barry Wels gains entry into a hotel room. It looks rather easy to do, and in fact this could have been the fallback method used if the door lock programmer they probably brought along failed. You will also note the way to protect yourself from such a method being used against you while you are in a hotel. While hotel door locks seem to be secure, according to Barry Wels, they are not that secure, and can be opened using a variety of methods. One of which would be to actually rent a room at the hotel and take the backup lock out of the door and build a master key around it. According to Barry Wels, one could in fact do this very thing;
This could point to the fact a lot of electronic hotel door locks have a mechanical override. Most of the time there is a mechanical lock mounted under the handle of the door that can be opened with a master key. In some cases the lock is even hidden under a sticker or label, but in most hotels I visited there is a lock present in case the electronic lock fails (in some countries it is not legal to rely only on the electronics). I know that in some hotel locks a mechanical opening is still recorded by the electronics in the lock and will end up in the log files. To get hold of the masterkey, one could rent a room in the same hotel and simply (for an intelligence agency that is) take the mechanical lock out the door, take it apart and make the master key based on the now known pin length. (Or if you believe the myth, ‘they’ already have done all the fieldwork and collected the mechanical master keys to all important hotels in advance anyway)
Another method which seems very easy to use is the method shown by Barry Wels in the video below;
http://www.thecoldspy.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/hotel.flvBarry Wels has also described this same method could in fact be used to put a chain back on the door from the outside. If this was in fact a tool that was used to place the chain on the door, could it stand to reason that this same entry method was used to gain entry into the room itself? Barry Wels quotes on his website how this method could in fact be used and said this:
Another way to open some hotel doors would be to simply go under the door and grab the handle from the inside using a special tool. As you can see in this video, it is not so difficult. And the tool used to go under the door is even available in a ‘government only’ version. This version can easily been taken apart into small segments but is only sold to government agents.
And I suggest a slightly modified tool like the one on the video was used for the finishing touch of the murder. To make it look like a natural death, they locked the chain on the inside of the door.
Barry Wels goes on to say that while he was giving a presentation at the IT-Defense security congress Germany, some of the attendees were unable to make the presentation, and in fact he had to use a mobile phone to record the process used so he could show it to these people in an emergency presentation when they arrived in Germany later on.
It is all a funny coincidence as the video of the tool was just shot a couple of weeks ago when Han Fey and I did a presentation at the famous IT-Defense security congress Germany. It is a congress where we always meet lots of interesting people and always get a lot of invitations to give more presentations and/or workshops. We were originally invited to just do some hands on workshops and teach people the basic locksport/lockpicking skills, as well as a few simple opening techniques like shimming doors etc. But when some of the conference speakers missed their plane, we were asked to give an ‘emergency presentation’ to fill the gap. And as we do not like to give the same presentation twice, we shot some video (using a mobile phone) on the spot late at night about the door opening tool (and how to protect yourself against it) and inserted it into a compilation of existing presentations. Originally I did not intend to release the video as it shows me opening a door, but in this case I make an exception.
Another tool that was used by the assassination team was encrypted cell phones, which were used to communicate instructions back and forth between the assassination team members and their control center. This technology, which is not in general use by the public, was in fact in 2008 only sold to governments and the military, even though the general public could have obtained such technology and used it. One such company that sells this technology to governments and the military is CryptoPhone, which is another company that Barry Wels also is involved with, and was in fact partially founded by. In this video below, Barry Wels talks about the technology used, along with its applications, such as encrypted text messaging and voice encryption, and also who buys such technology, and in fact, who needs to use this technology today and also why they need to use it.
http://www.thecoldspy.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/mobile.flvAs we can see above, professionals have the ability to gain entry to things that normally we would not think of. What this also says above is that governments probably use people like Barry Wels for intelligence and information, as well as technology for encryption of voice and text messages and other things the general public is not readily aware of. No doubt the governments involved, if they were actually involved in the assassination, probably used methods such as the ones that Barry Wels describes above, and in fact may even employ people such as him to give presentations at various conferences around the globe. Barry Wels has been to many conferences, both in Germany, Israel, and around the globe. People like him are in demand globally, and I am sure it pays very well to know what he knows.
The final question is, do governments employ methods such as what Barry Wels teaches? And if they do, it stands to reason that everyone should be aware that their own security can be easily penetrated and rendered obsolete.
