British spooks used in-house ‘lurl.me’ URL shortener to track targets and attack hackers

BRITISH INTELLIGENCE established its own URL shortening service in a bid to track activists during the recent-ish ‘Arab Spring’ and as a way to distribute nasty malware to people they wanted to hack.

GCHQ’s covert Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) created lurl.me in 2009 as a way to disseminate propaganda during the presidential elections in Iran that year. This allowed them to identify and track activists clicking on the links.

It also proved to be a handy ‘campaign management’ tool for tracking the success, or otherwise, of links to articles and other propaganda published via GCHQ’s many shonky social media accounts.

The suggestion was made by Mustafa al-Bassam, aka ‘tFlow’, co-founder of the LulzSec hacking ‘crew’. JTRIG, according to Al-Bassam, attempted to influence the presidential elections in Iran in 2009 and boost the revolutionary movement in Syria in 2011. For the full article click here 

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