This site, along with many other gaming websites, was at the center of one of the CIA’s biggest intelligence disasters.

Today, starwarsweb.net redirects to the official CIA website, but back in December 2010, the Wayback Machine showed it as a typical Star Wars fan site. The page itself was sparse, with Master Yoda oddly recommending Star Wars Battlefront II, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II, LEGO Star Wars II, and Star Wars: The Clone Wars — Republic Heroes. Security researcher Ciro Santilli revealed that this page was one of hundreds created by the CIA around 2010, designed to secretly communicate with foreign assets. Iranian authorities discovered these sites and linked them to the 2010–2012 assassinations of CIA sources in China.

Santilli’s work uncovered many more sites — focusing on sports, music, and gaming (such as havenofgamerz.com, hitpointgaming.com, activegaminginfo.com, myonlinegamesource.com, and kings-game.net). The use of languages like German, French, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese suggests that these were targeting specific users abroad. “It reveals a much larger number of websites. It gives a broader understanding of what the CIA was doing at the time, including democracies not previously mentioned as targets, and a statistical view of how much importance was given to various regions — unsurprisingly, the Middle East was a top priority,” said Santilli.

Yahoo first disclosed the scale of the operation in November 2018, detailing how the CIA’s online communication network fell apart: “According to the former intelligence official, once an Iranian double agent showed Iranian intelligence the website used to contact his CIA handlers, they began to search the internet for similar digital fingerprints. Eventually, they found the right set of search terms to locate the rest of the secret CIA sites. From there, they tracked who was visiting them and began to unravel the entire CIA network.”

This exposure ultimately led to the deaths of CIA sources, especially in China in 2011 and 2012. Reuters followed up with a 2022 report, detailing how Iranian intelligence identified individual CIA agents one by one. Once one IP address was found, it was easy to identify others linked to the same network. Reuters identified two sites and listed seven more examples, laying the groundwork for Santilli’s research. Santilli used this data to identify hundreds of domains he believes were part of the CIA’s secret infrastructure.

“It’s been about 15 years since these sites were active, but new details continue to emerge. Put simply: yes, the CIA had a Star Wars fan page with a hidden communication system. I can’t vouch for every detail in Santilli’s work, but it seems solid. This episode shows that developers make mistakes, and it sometimes takes years to find them — but this was no ordinary developer error,” said cybersecurity researcher Zach Edwards to 404 Media.

Santilli says it’s good for people to have access to more content than what you find in a museum. It’s great that the Wayback Machine lets people see these relics of espionage in their full glory.

Source : PCGamer, Archive.org, Our Big Book, 404 Media, Wikipedia