Second Apple Pickin' Spy Caught in Last 6 Months

The United States FBI this week accused a Chinese citizen working for Apple of attempting to steal trade secrets that are related to the company's autonomous vehicle program, reports NBC Bay Area.

Apple launched an investigation into the employee, Jizhong Chen, when another employee spotted him taking photographs "in a sensitive work space." 

 Apple Global Security employees searched his personal computer and found "thousands" of Apple files, including manuals, schematics, photographs, and diagrams. 

Chen had recently applied for a position with a China-based autonomous vehicle company that is a direct Apple competitor. Chen was arrested a day before he was set to fly to China. 

Apple in a statement said that it is working with the authorities."Apple takes confidentiality and the protection of our IP very seriously," the company said in a statement Tuesday. "We are working with authorities on this matter and are referring all questions to the FBI."

This is not the first time an employee has been caught trying to steal secrets from Apple's car team. Back in July, the FBI charged former Apple employee Xiaolang Zhang with theft of trade secrets for stealing hardware and software that included prototypes and detailed prototype requirements. more

Protecting Trade Secrets in Court Requires Special Security, Like TSCM

Federal prosecutors said a Chinese national employed by an Oklahoma petroleum company has been charged with stealing trade secrets.

Authorities said Hongjin Tan, 35, is accused of stealing trade secrets from his unnamed U.S.-based employer that operates a research facility in the Tulsa area.

An affidavit filed by the FBI alleges that Tan stole trade secrets about an unidentified product worth between $1.4 and $1.8 billion to his employer to benefit a Chinese company where Tan had been offered work. more

Gal Shpantzer, SANS NewsBites news editor notes... "Have you discussed the concept of trade secrets with your legal counsel? Trade secrets are only legally protected if you secure them in a certain manner, above and beyond normal confidential data. www.justice.gov: Reporting Intellectual Property Crime: A Guide for Victims of Copyright Infringement, Trademark Counterfeiting, and Trade Secret Theft (PDF)

Judge: "When did you last check for bugs?"

TSCM - Technical Surveillance Countermeasures

Security Director Alert - Well Produced Information Security Awareness Videos for Employees

Foreign intelligence entities, which may include foreign governments, corporations, and their proxies, are actively targeting information, assets, and technologies that are vital to both U.S. national security and our global competitiveness. 

Increasingly, U.S. companies are in the cross-hairs of these foreign intelligence entities, which are breaching private computer networks, pilfering American business secrets and innovation, and carrying out other illicit activities.

The National Counterintelligence and Security Center is dedicated to raising awareness among government employees and private industry about these foreign intelligence threats, the risks they pose, and the defensive measures necessary for individuals and organizations to safeguard that which has been entrusted to their protection.

The following products will enable personnel to better understand these threats and provide guidance and tips for protecting the sensitive information, assets, technologies, and networks to which employees have access. It will also serve to help them protect their personal, confidential information that may be used by others to gain their trust. more

Videos:
Social Media Deception Trailer
Social Media Deception
Social Media Deception Full Video
Social Engineering
Spear Phishing (30 second trailer)
Spear Phishing 2017
Spear Phishing Full Video
Travel Awareness
Human Targeting
Supply Chain Risk Management
Economic Espionage  (True story.)

The Surprising Spy Story Behind Lafayette Radio

by Rich Post KB8TAD 

Lafayette's three owners
Sometimes when you look closely at a company, a surprise pops up. Such was the case with Lafayette. The change in corporate names in 1939-40 and the separate catalogs in 1942 as well as the sudden and permanent disappearance of Lafayette from Atlanta and Chicago in 1951 triggered the question of why. Was there a rift among partners?

Searching on the names of the three owners as stated in the Federal Trade Commission action against Wholesale Radio in 1935 turned up nothing until... A search on the correctly-spelled names of Samuel J. Novick and Max H. Krantzberg came up with Krantzberg as the Executive Vice President of Lafayette with stock holdings just a bit less than President and Chairman Abraham Pletman in a Securities and Exchange Commission report in 1961. Each owned roughly a third of the outstanding shares...

The communist connection
Novick was not actually the author of "A Plan for America at Peace" but his company sponsored and paid for the publication. He had immigrated to the US from Czarist Russia in 1914 at age 17. One of his early jobs in the US was radio telegrapher. He became an excellent business man. He was also an avowed communist who allegedly paid the bills for radio commentators from the American Communist Party on the Blue radio network. He supported a variety of organizations later deemed to be underground communist groups according to FBI reports. Some labor unions at the time were also controlled by communists allegedly including the one that had honored him. Of course, in free speech America, this was allowed.

Spies and Lies
However, it was after the FBI uncovered a Russian spy that Samuel Novick came to their attention.

Arthur Adams was a high-ranking undercover GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) operative under the code named "Achilles" and was assigned along with others in the NKVD (forerunner of the Russian KGB) to obtain US corporate and military technology secrets.

In 1937 Novick had written a letter to the US Immigration and Naturalization Service vouching that Adams was a highly skilled radio engineer who had worked for him for 10 years at Wholesale Radio as its Canadian representative and was needed in the US. It was a lie.  more

Extra Credit: Explore old Lafayette catalogues here, and later ones here. Old issues of Monitoring Times may be obtained here.

Business Espionage Info-Theft: When they can't hack it, they grab the employees.

Investigators discovered what they believed to be a major infiltration campaign.

Two years before Equifax Inc. stunned the world with the announcement it had been hacked, the credit-reporting company believed it was the victim of another theft...

In the previously undisclosed incident, security officials feared that former employees had removed thousands of pages of proprietary information before leaving and heading to jobs in China. Materials included code for planned new products, human-resources files and manuals...

According to the people familiar with the probe, the investigators, by talking to Equifax employees and examining email accounts and LinkedIn messages sent to them, saw indications that recruiters purporting to represent Ant affiliate Alibaba had offered to triple salaries for certain ethnically Chinese Equifax employees—and provided instructions on specific Equifax information they should bring along if they jumped ship. more

Silicon Valley – Den of Spies

Foreign spies have been showing up uninvited, to San Francisco and Silicon Valley for a very long time.

According to former U.S. intelligence officials, that’s true today more than ever. In fact, they warn—especially because of increasing Russian and Chinese aggressiveness, and the local concentration of world-leading science and technology firms—there’s a full-on epidemic of espionage on the West Coast right now. And even more worrisome, many of its targets are unprepared to deal with the growing threat.

Unlike on the East Coast, foreign intel operations here aren’t as focused on the hunt for diplomatic secrets, political intelligence or war plans. The open, experimental, cosmopolitan work and business culture of Silicon Valley in particular has encouraged a newer, “softer,” “nontraditional” type of espionage, said former intelligence officials—efforts that mostly target trade secrets and technology.

“It’s a very subtle form of intelligence collection that is more business connected and oriented,” one told me. But this economic espionage is also ubiquitous. Spies “are very much part of the everyday environment” here, said this person. Another former intelligence official told me that, at one point recently, a full 20 percent of all the FBI’s active counterintelligence-related intellectual property cases had originated in the Bay Area. (The FBI declined to comment for this story.) more

Spies Target US Colleges, Universities

via VOA...
Colleges and universities are not the first places most people would think to find government spies. But reporter Dan Golden said that is not the case.

“There’s an awful lot more international students, international professors at American universities. Some of them are here to gather information for their countries."

Golden recently spoke with VOA about his book “Spy Schools.” In the book, he gives examples of spying at U.S. colleges and universities. He says the free exchange of ideas and mix of cultures at universities increase the chances for spying to take place.

Charlie McGonigal leads the counterintelligence division at the Federal Bureau of Investigation in New York. He said spying at universities is a big problem.

“There’s a lot of research and development at major universities in the United States that a foreign government would look to exploit by sending students to study at these universities.” more

Spy Sites of Washington, DC (book)

SPY SITES OF WASHINGTON, D.C.
By Robert Wallace and H. Keith Melton (with Henry R. Schlesinger)

“Spy Sites” could be considered two books in one. It is a capsule history of spying in and around D.C., with crisply written profiles of the major players.

Even intelligence buffs will encounter a few unfamiliar names. Consider, for instance, Thomas Atwood Digges, a Marylander who worked in London to free American sailors imprisoned by the British. Yet he was so sloppy with his accounts that Benjamin Franklin (for whom he was a sometime courier) denounced him as a rogue and scoundrel. But there is a monument to him on the Digges family estate across the Potomac from Mount Vernon.

“Spy Sites” is also a guide book that should be invaluable for weeks of Sunday afternoon spy walks or drives — from downtown to tranquil suburbs. With maps and photos, it enables the reader to view the obscure dead drops that such rogues as Aldrich Ames, John Walker and Robert Hanssen used to pass secrets to the Soviets — “you are there” experiences of the first order.

There are also some seldom-discussed secrets as to how FBI and other counterintelligence officers “spied on the spies.”

Readers can trust the expertise of the authors. Robert Wallace ran CIA’s Office of Technical Services, which invents spycraft equipment for communications and other covert chores. R. Keith Melton, an Annapolis graduate, owns one of the largest collections of spy artifacts in existence.  more

Business Espionage: Houston Fortune 500 Energy Company Invaded Twice

The Federal Bureau of Investigation says it is looking into the theft of intellectual property from a Fortune 500 company in Houston’s energy corridor.

The company has asked to not be identified for security reasons, but the FBI wants to know why the man took several items from the business during its off-hours last year.

The man was caught on camera during the theft and during another burglary attempt at the same company.



According to the FBI, at approximately 3 a.m. on June 25 the burglar gained unauthorized access into the building through a defective door. After spending a couple of hours inside, the man exited with property belonging to the company and its employees.

On Dec. 30, the same man attempted to enter the same Fortune 500 Company. This time, the man was unable to get into the secure area of the building. He stole a security radio from a desk in the lobby on his way out. more

As IT security becomes better, intrusion, theft and the planting of bugging devices will increase. Conduct periodic technical surveillance countermeasures (TSCM) to reduce opportunities and risk. Read the Facilities Management article,  How to Handle Counterespionage to learn how. ~Kevin

Quote of the Week

"We have never had absolute privacy in this country." ~FBI Director James Comey more