Cops Spying on Cops, the Village President & Spycamer's in Crawlspaces

IN - A second lawsuit has been filed against New Carlisle alleging command staff in the police department secretly recorded private conversations... The five plaintiffs claim that Deputy Police Chief Brian Thompson and Chief Calleb Dittmar allegedly secretively “placed, or caused to be placed,” recording devices in the ceilings of non-essential areas of the department. more

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IL - Former Hinckley Chief of Police Kimberly S. Everhart has been charged with eavesdropping and official misconduct after Illinois State Police say she illegally recorded a conversation with the village president in 2017. more

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GA - A Catoosa County man is facing a handful of privacy invasion charges after he allegedly broke into a Ringgold residence and planted monitoring equipment, police say.

According to the Catoosa County Sheriff’s Office: Samuel David Townsend, 32, of 103 Parkview Drive in Ringgold, was arrested March 7 on charges of first-degree burglary, possession or sale of an eavesdropping device, unlawful eavesdropping, and Peeping Tom.

...resident reported suspicious sounds coming from underneath her home.

The victim said she was getting out of the shower when she heard a sound coming from the house’s master bathroom. The woman claimed she initially thought a mouse was in the home, but that the noise got louder almost like something was being cut...

...a white truck parked out on the street in front of the home and that the crawl space at the back of the house was open...

Sheriff Gary Sisk said Townsend did some work at the home in the past, and that he planted a recording device. more

Spybuster Tip # 629 - Watch What You Say at the Drive-Thru

Next time you have a private conversation while in a drive-through, you might want to keep it quiet — as workers in fast food restaurants are able to hear you, even when you can’t hear them.

Well, as long as they are wearing a headset and you’re parked next to the microphone with your window down, that is.

...the revelation on r/LifeProTips: They posted; “If we apologize [sic] and say we’ll be with you in a minute – you’re not on hold, we can hear everything. If you’ve ordered but the drive-thru line won’t let you pull ahead yet – we can hear every single thing you’re saying.

Suggesting that having the ability to eavesdrop isn’t always a good thing, they added: “I wish I could forget some of the stuff I’ve heard.” more

Mr. Blobby - UK TV Star & Accidential Voyeur

UK - Mr. Blobby is a big, pink blobby thing covered in yellow dots resembling a dangerous bout of liver cirrhosis. He also happens to be a dearly loved kids’ character on British TV.

However, he could have some explaining to do to Mrs. Blobby after he was caught perving on a naked woman in a bath on a billboard in the northern British city of Leicester.

Thankfully, all is not what it seems and it appears ...

A storm on Friday damaged the existing billboard’s skin – an ad for telco firm BT that showed a woman in a bath watching her laptop – which then revealed the previous ad that featured Mr. Blobby. more

Doctor Charged with Filming Women in Bathroom

We're guessing, "It's okay, I'm a doctor," will not be a valid defense.

NJ - New evidence has emerged in the case of a former Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School doctor charged with secretly recording women in a bathroom at the city hospital, according to prosecutors.

...after being charged last month in a 160-count indictment with invasion of privacy, computer theft, wiretapping, burglary, official misconduct and impersonation. ...is facing third-degree charges of allegedly photographing or videotaping victims, without their consent or knowledge, while their "intimate parts" were exposed. He’s facing fourth-degree charges in similar instances, except the victims were wearing underwear. ...the FBI is still investigating. more

Security Director Alert: Mirai Botnet Targets Corporate Presentation Systems

A new variant of the crushing Mirai botnet, which specifically places enterprises in its crosshairs, has been discovered by security researchers...

Click to enlarge.

Mirai is still a botnet designed to exploit IoT devices, but in its latest iteration it seeks out vulnerable business devices - specifically, wireless presentation systems and the TVs used to present to rooms full of clients, partners and colleagues. 

"This new Mirai is a perfect example of why every organisation needs to map their own networks from an external point of view and close off everything that is open and does not need to be," said Jamo Niemela, principal researcher at F-secure. "The types of new devices that Mirai attacks have no business of being visible to the Internet."

The WePresent WiPG-1000 wireless presentation system and the LG Supersign TV were the two devices singled-out by researchers as most vulnerable to the attack. more

In addition to checking for electronic eavesdropping devices and general information security loopholes, make sure your TSCM technicians examine IoT device settings.

Keep Your Number Private – And Still Receive Calls!

An inexpensive and easy service...

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Bonus: 

• The Murray Associates Smartphone Security Tips
• How to Block Caller ID

The Tasmanians Have a Great Sense of Humor

Sign on hotel wall at Hobart Airport...

Ten Years of Bugging a Woman's Home Brings... a misconduct hearing?!?!

UK - A serving South Yorkshire police officer will face a misconduct hearing after being accused of bugging a woman’s home to listen in on her private conversations.

PC Christopher Birkett is accused of placing covert listening devices in a woman’s home on ‘various dates’ between March 2007 and August 2017 to listen in on her conversations.

It is alleged that on some of the occasions, PC Birkett was on duty at the time. more

Facebook - Also Concerned About Their Privacy

Nick Lovrien, the tech behemoth's chief global security officer, said in an interview...

"We work to protect intellectual property in many ways, and that's everything from making sure [employees'] computer screens on airplanes are covered so people don't accidentally share information they're not supposed to, to accidentally leaving things on the printers ... to white boards being cleaned at night," Lovrien said, adding that Facebook has additional systems in place "that identify if people are inappropriately accessing information they shouldn't have."

That's not just a theoretical risk. In the last six months, two Chinese Apple employees working on the company's secretive self-driving car project have been charged with stealing the iPhone maker's trade secrets...

Business Insider has spoken with numerous current and former employees and reviewed internal documents for an in-depth investigation into how Facebook handles its corporate security.

Sources described a hidden world of stalkers, stolen prototypes, state-sponsored espionage concerns, secret armed guards, car-bomb concerns, and more. Today, there are a staggering 6,000 people in Facebook's global security organization, working to safeguard the company's 80,000-strong workforce of employees and contractors around the world. more

The Case of The Handyman Cam

A Kentucky man accused of installing a video camera in a family’s bathroom is now facing additional felony charges...41-year-old Ryan C. Lloyd was charged with video voyeurism...

Police say a family hired Lloyd to fix a light fixture. A few days later, the family discovered a camera with an SD card had been wired to the light fixture. Police found 87 recordings on the card, including two images of a naked juvenile and images of two partially nude adults. more

FutureWatch: Stingrays May Be Stung by Apple Cell Phone Patent

Apple has filed a patent application on a new method of encryption, which complicates obtaining of confidential information.

The patent describes a technology that will not allow any device to keep track of the IMSI (international mobile subscriber identifier)...

Innovation may interfere with the use of Stingray devices, which act as masts for mobile phones. These devices can track the location of users or even to listen to personal calls. They are also sometimes called IMSI catchers. more

FutureWatch: Cheaper Infrared Cameras

A new breakthrough by scientists with the University of Chicago, however, may one day lead to much more cost-effective infrared cameras—which in turn could enable infrared cameras for common consumer electronics like phones, as well as sensors to help autonomous cars see their surroundings more accurately.

They tweaked the quantum dots so that they had a formula to detect short-wave infrared and one for mid-wave infrared. Then they laid both together on top of a silicon wafer.

The resulting camera performs extremely well and is much easier to produce. "It's a very simple process," Tang said. "You take a beaker, inject a solution, inject a second solution, wait five to 10 minutes, and you have a new solution that can be easily fabricated into a functional device." more

The New 'Cone of Silence', or The Death of Acoustical Ducting

Boston University researchers, Xin Zhang, a professor at the College of Engineering, and Reza Ghaffarivardavagh, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, released a paper in Physical Review B demonstrating it's possible to silence noise using an open, ringlike structure, created to mathematically perfect specifications, for cutting out sounds while maintaining airflow.

"Today's sound barriers are literally thick heavy walls," says Ghaffarivardavagh. ...they are a clunky approach not well suited to situations where airflow is also critical...

They calculated the dimensions and specifications that the metamaterial would need to have in order to interfere with the transmitted sound waves, preventing sound—but not air—from being radiated through the open structure. The basic premise is that the metamaterial needs to be shaped in such a way that it sends incoming sounds back to where they came from, they say.

As a test case, they decided to create a structure that could silence sound from a loudspeaker. Based on their calculations, they modeled the physical dimensions that would most effectively silence noises... The metamaterial, ringing around the internal perimeter of the pipe's mouth, worked like a mute button. more

Corporate Security: Will Your "Secret" Status Hold Up in Court?

via Epstein Becker Green - Peter A. Steinmeyer
A federal judge in Chicago recently taught a painful lesson to an Illinois employer: even if information is sufficiently sensitive and valuable that it could qualify as a “trade secret,” it won’t unless the owner of the information took adequate steps to protect its secrecy. 

This doesn't qualify.

In a thorough opinion issued in the case, Abrasic 90 Inc., d/b/a CGW Camel Grinding Wheels, USA v. Weldcote Metals, Inc., Joseph O’Mera and Colleen Cervencik, U.S. District Judge John J. Tharp, Jr. of the Northern District of Illinois explained that “there are two basic elements to the analysis” of whether information qualifies as a “trade secret”:

(1) the information “must have been sufficiently secret to impart economic value because of its relative secrecy” and

(2) the owner “must have made reasonable efforts to maintain the secrecy of the information.” more

Contact a Technical Information Security Consultant if you are unsure about the "reasonable efforts" you should be taking.

FutureWatch: Invisible-Light-Powered Eavesdropping Devices

Wi-Charge uses safe infrared light to deliver power from a distance. Our products provide enough power to charge a phone across a room, to power smart devices and enable new experiences. With Wi-Charge, mobile and IoT devices appear to charge autonomously. New applications open for homes, offices, factories and public spaces.

Battery-powered devices are portable, but battery capacity limits functionality and the need to replace batteries degrades the user experience. Moving wired devices, routing or hiding the power cords is a pain. Wi-Charge delivers 100x the power budget of battery solutions. With Wi-Charge, you can have the convenience of wire-free portability with a power budget approaching to a wired solution. more

Lots of good uses, and possibly some evil ones. 
Thanks to another Canadian Blue Blaze Irregular for spotting this one!