Since the end of June, the media have been talking about a possible new magazine distributed by Al-Qaeda and promoted on various Islamic websites. One reason I was interested by this document was a message I read in some extremist forums saying it could contain viruses and spyware.

In searching I found two documents. Each had 67 pages and each seemed corrupted. The first three pages were readable, but the others contained only ASCII debris. I will not comment here about the content of the first pages; they have been sufficiently debated in the media. (Click to enlarge.)

My first surprise was my PDF reader was able to open the files, despite their appearing to be corrupted. At first, both files looked identical. In closely examining the first nonreadable page, I saw a difference: In one case, the top and bottom margins were visible. Inside, a filename and path puzzled me–C:\Users\m050\Desktop\ellenbca.pdf. (Click to enlarge.)

Searching the web for ellenbca.pdf, I discovered one interesting file: a document on the best cupcakes in America by someone named Dulcy Israel. (I’m not making this up!)

I also found a French blog post named  «Al-Qaïda Magazine»: la manipulation dévoilée (in English: the disclosed trick). This post explained that New Yorker Lee Gillentine had analyzed the cupcake file and discovered someone had opened it as an ASCII-encoded file in a Windows-based text editor, printed a PDF from this text editor, and then merged it with the first three pages of the so-called Al-Qaïda Magazine. (Click to enlarge.)

The only thing apparently missing was the white words on black background. But not really! In fact, each nonprintable ASCII character was replaced by its abbreviation. For example, the hex 00 for NULL and the hex 18 for CANCEL, forming NULCAN (shorthand for Null and Cancel). This patterns runs throughout the whole document.

My searches also turned up a possible newspaper with a title and a font very similar to the one I investigated. Found on a web page containing garbage HTML code with Al-Qaeda references, this second discovery left me wondering.

Despite the noise around this assumed Al-Qaeda document, I am unconvinced of its origin. I doubt it is a terrorist creation. Cybercrime and political hacktivism have invaded the Internet, but disinformation can also be a powerful force.

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