Sometimes the spooks get so creative they get unintentionally amusing. Take the case of disinformation, the next big frontier in computer security.

Those bright sparks at DARPA (Defense Research Projects Agency) have begun work on a computer program that can write deliberately false documents. The idea was to catch Wikileaks snoopers, and hopefully lure unsuspecting web sites into publishing them (for future embarrassment to the leakers).

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"We want to flood adversaries with information that's bogus, but looks real," says Salvatore Stolfo, the Columbia University computer science professor leading the project. "This will confound and misdirect them." (You can make your own fake doc on the research lab's website, too.) ( . . . )

If a bogus document is actually released online, it would shatter the credibility of the whistleblowing website that published it, said Stolfo. So even after an attacker has hacked through firewalls, tricked intrusion detection technology and gained unfettered access into a system, he'll hesitate before making away with the goods.

Columbia University has a pending patent application on the decoy-creating technology. Stolfo co-founded Allure Security Technology in 2009 to make products based on that technology.

"I don't know who has the patent for the concept of deception, though," he joked. "It possibly dates back to the time of Adam and Eve. Now we're trying to automate the process."

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/11/darpa-trap-wikileaks/

Wait until somebody, uh, leaks a copy of the software to both political parties.

The fly in the ointment is that somewhere, somehow, there's got to be a way to discriminate between the bogus documents and the real ones. Otherwise the people who have a legitimate need for those documents are in the same boat as the leakers and the spies.

Since that situation's obviously unacceptable there is a way to discriminate between the bogus documents and the real stuff. So it's just one more task for those pursuing the genuine documents to accomplish not a brick wall they can't get over, under, around or through.