Wireless Tech to Steal Luxury Cars in Seconds

As they both walked through a dimly lit parking garage, one of the pair of men peered at a black, laptop-sized device inside his messenger bag. Using buttons on its outer case, he flicked through various options on the device's bright LED screen before landing on his choice....

"EvanConnect," one of the men in the video who goes by a pseudonym online, embodies a bridge between digital and physical crime. These devices he sells for thousands of dollars let other people break into and steal high end vehicles. He claims to have had clients in the U.S., UK, Australia, and a number of South American and European countries.

"Honestly I can tell you that I have not stolen a car with technology," Evan told Motherboard. "It's very easy to do but the way I see it: why would I get my hands dirty when I can make money just selling the tools to other people." more

FutureWatch: Mind-Reading Called Brain-Hacking - Food for Thought

The world is in the middle of a new technology arms race, according to best-selling historian Yuval Noah Harari, who warns that the prize being fought over this time is not physical territory, but our brains. 

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Harari predicted a future where governments and corporations will be able to gather enough data about citizens around the world that, when combined with computational power, will let them completely predict – and manipulate – our decisions. Harari calls this concept "brain-hacking".

"Imagine, if 20 years from now, you could have someone sitting in Washington, or Beijing, or San Francisco, and they could know the entire personal, medical, sexual history of, say, every journalist, judge and politician in Brazil," said Harari.

"You could control a whole other country with data. At which point you may ask: is it an independent country, or is it a data colony?" more   Previous mind-reading posts.

Hidden Smart Device Commands: Manchurian Candidate, or "Yes, master."

Many people have grown accustomed to talking to their smart devices, asking them to read a text, play a song or set an alarm. But someone else might be secretly talking to them, too.

Over the past two years, researchers in China and the United States have begun demonstrating that they can send hidden commands that are undetectable to the human ear to Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant.

Inside university labs, the researchers have been able to secretly activate the artificial intelligence systems on smartphones and smart speakers, making them dial phone numbers or open websites.  

In the wrong hands, the technology could be used to unlock doors, wire money or buy stuff online — simply with music playing over the radio. more

Dronebusters

Two drones headed north above Capitol Boulevard toward the Idaho statehouse. Lt. Gov. Brad Little stood to Gov. Butch Otter’s right at the top of the Capitol steps and watched...

The demonstration by Black Sage Technologies showed off the Boise company’s system to immobilize drones that might be carry a bomb, drop contraband or weapons into prison recreation yards, or spy on sensitive operations.

Black Sage uses cameras, radar and other tools to detect drones. It can see them at least three and a half miles away. The company sometimes demonstrates its anti-drone system at military bases. Wednesday’s exhibition was one of the few times the public has gotten to see it. more

This Week in Spycam News - Cautionary Tales for our Times

• Fired former London teacher pleads to 16 charges for secret videos shot in staff changeroom at school. more

• “Roger” is a security guard. He’s vague on the exact details, but his jobs afford him access to several rooftops in the downtown area of an unnamed city. One of these roofs has a view of a high-rise hotel across the street. The building’s windows are so high up that guests tend to feel safe leaving the curtains open. So, Roger climbs out onto a ledge on the roof, trains his handheld high-zoom camera on the uncovered windows, and hits record. Then, if he happens to catch an unsuspecting woman, especially a naked one, he posts the video on the Internet. more

• Deputies in Chester charged a man with voyeurism Sunday after receiving a report that he hid a cell phone in a teen girl’s bedroom that took footage of her as she left the shower naked, police said. more

Read more here: http://www.heraldonline.com/news/local/crime/article149267889.html#storylink=cpy

• A Kingston man has been charged by the Ontario Provincial Police in Quinte West after a woman reported a camera taking her picture. She had been in the changing area of a Trenton business when she noticed a camera taking a picture of her. At that time the OPP charged the accused with one count of voyeurism. more

• A man is charged with video recording a 16-year-old girl without her knowledge while she was in the shower, according to the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office. more

• An ex-finance director who hid spycams to secretly film almost 700 videos of colleagues has walked free from court. Mark Logan planted the cameras in digital clocks in a toilet at the Wheatley Group offices in Glasgow city centre. The shamed 48 year-old also carried out the crime while on business trips in Edinburgh and London. A sheriff heard how Logan could be seen in footage putting a device on the bedside table of one of his victims... The secret cameras had been hidden in a toilet. Logan was snared when bosses at Wheatley discovered three digital clocks which had recording equipment inside them. more

• Former Palm Beach Gardens High School's athletic director William Weed has turned in his resignation. Weed was arrested Monday after an investigation that started in February. A police report stated that he used a covert camera to obtain videos and images of a female juvenile. more

Businesses: Embarrassment, reputation damage and lawsuits are the end result of these incidents. Learn how to protect your employees, customers, visitors and yourself. more

FutureWatch - FM Bugs Are So Arco - Coming Soon... Bugs with Pluck

For the first time in history, a prototype radio has been created that is claimed to be completely digital, generating high-frequency radio waves purely through the use of integrated circuits and a set of patented algorithms without using conventional analog radio circuits in any way whatsoever. This breakthrough technology promises to vastly improve the wireless communications capabilities of everything from 5G mobile technology to the multitude devices aimed at supporting the Internet of Things.

The significance of this new technology cannot be overstated: Every aspect of radio frequency generation is said to be created using a string of digital bits, and nothing else. There are no analog circuits, no filters, no chokes, none of the traditional circuitry and components expected in a radio transmitter. Consisting of a mere handful of components, including a couple of integrated circuits, an antenna, and not much else, the transmitter – dubbed Pizzicato – promises to change the face of wireless transmission.

Created by Cambridge Consultants, the initial trials of the Pizzicato have been claimed to show that it has fully met all the expectations of its myriad performance requirements. But more than this, the Pizzicato has brought bulky radio circuits down to microprocessor levels, with the promise of even smaller, more efficient uses of the technology in future. more

Build Your Own Invisiability Device for Under $150

Researchers at the University of Rochester create a 3-D, transmitting, continuously multidirectional cloaking device. ... and they say you can too!
(more)
(more)
To build your own Rochester Cloak, follow these simple steps:

For their demonstration cloak, the researchers used 50mm achromatic doublets with focal lengths f1 = 200mm and f2 = 75mm

1. Purchase 2 sets of 2 lenses with different focal lengths f₁ and f₂ (4 lenses total, 2 with f₁ focal length, and 2 with f₂ focal length)
2. Separate the first 2 lenses by the sum of their focal lengths (So f₁ lens is the first lens, f₂ is the 2nd lens, and they are separated by t₁= f₁+ f₂).
3. Do the same in Step 2 for the other two lenses.
4. Separate the two sets by t₂=2 f₂ (f₁+ f₂) / (f₁— f₂) apart, so that the two f₂ lenses are t₂ apart.

NOTES:

• Achromatic lenses provide best image quality.
• Fresnel lenses can be used to reduce the total length (2t₁+t₂)
• Smaller total length should reduce edge effects and increase the range of angles.
• For an easier, but less ideal, cloak, you can try the 3 lens cloak in the paper.

A patent has been filed for this cloaking device. Please contact UR Ventures for additional information.

Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE X) Conference - New York City, July 18-20

HOPE X will take place on July 18, 19, and 20, 2014 at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City. H.O.P.E. stands for Hackers On Planet Earth, one of the most creative and diverse hacker events in the world. It's been happening since 1994.

Three full days and nights of activities, including the provocative and enlightening speakers for which the HOPE conferences are known. In addition, there will be access to a massive amount of space to put together all sorts of hacker projects and assorted fun stuff.

Pre-register for HOPE X! Tickets are on sale at the 2600 store or can be purchased with Bitcoins! (more)

New Tiny Ultrasound Camera Sees What's in Your Heart ...really

Developed by a team at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the device consists of a 1.5-mm-wide disc-shaped head, from which trails 13 tiny joined cables. The idea is that it will be inserted into a patient's coronary blood vessels or heart, snaking its way through while being pushed or pulled from outside the body via an integrated 430-micron-wide guide wire, all the while using the cables to transmit ultrasound imagery.

Its head is built around a single silicon chip, which is equipped with a dual-ring array of 56 ultrasound transmit elements and 48 receive elements. Much of the processing of the ultrasound data is performed onboard the chip itself, meaning that less information has to carried outside the body – this is why it requires no more than 13 cables, allowing its consolidated "umbilical cord" to stay skinny and flexible enough to easily move through blood vessels. (more)

Jazzpunk: A Spy Game Full Of Jokes

Jazzpunk has been nominated for the grand prize at the 2014 Independent Games Festival, is to video games what movies like Airplane!, The Naked Gun and Hot Shots are to film...

The setup is charmingly basic and silly, like the rest of the game. After an upbeat and stylized Saul Bass-inspired intro, you are plopped into your role as Polyblank, a spy for an unnamed organization helmed by a bureau chief who makes his office in a subway car and sounds like the person that delivered Ethan Hunt his impossible missions, perhaps if he was talking through a fishbowl.

With the satisfying wheeze of an obviously placed whoopee cushion, the game wastes no time letting you know you are here for the gags, not the story. (more)

   
Jazzpunk is a first-person comedy adventure game set in an alternate-reality Cold War World, plagued with Corporate Espionage, CyberCrime™, and Sentient Martinis. Gameplay is inspired by spoof comedy films and cartoons of yester-year (eg: Naked Gun, Airplane!, Hot Shots, etc), with a focus on weird gadgets, exotic locales, and open-world style exploration.

"And then, we mandate implants to remotely stop people."

The European Union is secretly developing a "remote stopping" device to be fitted to all cars that would allow the police to disable vehicles at the flick of a switch from a control room.

Confidential documents from a committee of senior EU police officers, who hold their meetings in secret, have set out a plan entitled "remote stopping vehicles" as part of wider law enforcement surveillance and tracking measures.

"The project will work on a technological solution that can be a 'build in standard' for all cars that enter the European market," said a restricted document.

The devices, which could be in all new cars by the end of the decade, would be activated by a police officer working from a computer screen in a central headquarters. (more)

"Calling all hackers. Calling all hackers..."

Laser Beam Eavesdropping - In the News Again

Since the 1970's, stories about laser listeners have periodically popped up in the news. The common thread is their magical ability to eavesdrop from far away using only an invisible beam of light. Fear mongering is the next element, closely followed by, "very expensive, only the government can buy one."

The reporters are either clueless or haven't done any decent research. Their information sources have vested interests: like governments spreading disinformation; or "de-bugging experts" and spyshop owners hoping the publicity will boost their business. Funny, a working device is never demonstrated, and nobody even claims first-hand knowledge.

Today, the BBC fell victim. Here is the story they published...

Not true.

The UK government has warned the Guardian newspaper that foreign agents could use laser technology to eavesdrop on them, in the wake of recent surveillance leaks. What are laser listening devices and are they effective? (more)

The theory is sound. CD / DVD players use it on a small scale. YouTube is full of videos demonstrating the technique... under very controlled conditions, with less than sterling results. But, is it really a practical surveillance tool? Click here for our research.

Spy Camera Glasses - Austin Powers is Thrilled

Question Mark & the Mysterians may sue... 

from the manufacturer...
"Ankaka launches Innovative Spy Camera Glasses Espionage. The high tech spy gadget manufacturer Ankaka is back!

This time they bring people the Spy Camera Glasses espionage-spy-camera-sunglasses; Very stylish and comfortable to use, this latest make of high quality spy gadgets enables people to walk around with no worries as people spy on their subject..." (more) (video)

CUT! 
Enough already. This insults the word covert. It's time to stop applying the word "spy" to everything. (grab your glasses and sing-a-long)

The Mysterians and Question Mark...or viceversa?

Worried about all those security cameras tracking your every move? Try rocking one of these visors and enjoy anonymity once again.

At least that's what Isao Echizen from Japan's National Institute of Informatics is trying to achieve with the Privacy Visor (PDF).

Developed with Seiichi Gohshi of Kogakuin University, the visor has a near-infrared light source that messes up cameras but doesn't affect the wearer's vision, according to the institute.

They're hardly fashionable, but the lights create noise that prevents computer vision algorithms from extracting the features needed to recognize a face. (more) (get the t-shirt) (sing-a-long)

FutureWatch: New TSCM Tool on the Far Horizon

A secret agent is racing against time. He knows a bomb is nearby. He rounds a corner, spots a pile of suspicious boxes in the alleyway, and pulls out his cell phone. As he scans it over the packages, their contents appear onscreen. In the nick of time, his handy smartphone application reveals an explosive device, and the agent saves the day.

Already in use, but not yet cheap and portable.

Sound far-fetched? In fact it is a real possibility, thanks to tiny inexpensive silicon microchips developed by a pair of electrical engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). 

The chips generate and radiate high-frequency electromagnetic waves, called terahertz (THz) waves, that fall into a largely untapped region of the electromagnetic spectrum—between microwaves and far-infrared radiation—and that can penetrate a host of materials without the ionizing damage of X-rays.

When incorporated into handheld devices, the new microchips could enable a broad range of applications in fields ranging from homeland security (and TSCM) to wireless communications (new types of bugs) to health care, and even touchless gaming. In the future, the technology may lead to noninvasive cancer diagnosis, among other applications. (more)

Michael Murdock's Atomic Powered Surveillance Bot

Click to enlarge

Created by Michael Murdock of Sabor Design Studios. Visit him at, Sabor Designs. (more)

FutureWatch: Wireless Bugging Not Based on the Electro-Magnetic Spectrum for Transmission

Neutrinos have been in the news recently, and although it appears that they probably do not travel faster than light, they still hold court as three of the strangest of the known subatomic particles. Undeterred by these arcane particles, Fermilab scientists have succeeded in communicating with neutrino pulses through 240 meters of rock at a rate of 0.1 bits per second.

Although only capable of sending one alphanumeric character every minute, this is still an experimental tour de force that demonstrates the feasibility of using neutrino beams to provide a low-rate communications link independent of any electromagnetic radiation. 

FutureWatch: However, given the limited range, low data rate, and extreme technologies required to achieve this demonstration, significant improvements in neutrino beams and detectors will be required for “practical” applications of neutrino communications. (more)

Japanese Acoustic Ray Gun Silences Blabbing Godzillas

Tired of listening to a boring talk, a lecture or a colleague rattling in the office? The Japanese have found an answer to your woes. You can now silence the talk with a speech jamming gun.

The device developed by Kazutaka Kurihara at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology and Koji Tsukada at Ochanomizu University can silence any person talking from about 100 feet distance.

When used the gun, an inbuilt microphone picks up the words being said and then plays it back 0.2 seconds later. According to an explanation provided by the two inventors, the human brain interprets this echo effect as silence. (more) (Kazutaka Kurihara's Website) (Speech Jammer Research Paper)

Kazutaka also has a flare for the dramatic. Watch as the jammer comes into view to do its deed. Reminds me of those wonderful Japanese 1950's horror movies.

Sick of Snooki? Tired of Trump? Fab-a-dab-a-Zap Shutdafacesup!

MAKE video producer Matt Richardson from Brooklyn shows you how to use an Arduino microcontroller to mute your television based on keywords found in the broadcast's closed captioning transcription. You can rest easy knowing that you'll never have to hear about Kim Kardashian—or whoever you're sick of—again! 

"A while ago it was Charlie Sheen. And then it was Sarah Palin. And then it was Donald Trump," said Richardson, who is a video producer for Make Magazine. "And after a while I realized there's sort of always someone who I don't really want to hear about."

Like any good hacker, Richardson decided to come up with a fix: He developed a do-it-yourself TV remote control that will automatically mute the television when certain celebrity names are mentioned.

He plans to debut and explain the hack at the upcoming Maker Faire event in New York. The name of his talk is "Enough Already: Silencing Celebs with Arduino." (more) (Wanna go?)

Snidley Whiplash Visits the Home Security Store... by "Bob"

I know some pretty interesting people. Very talented. Very sharp. Very imaginative. I received the following from one of them this week. We'll call him "Bob". Bob's thought process is part Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) and part Snidely Whiplash. Enjoy... (emphasis below is mine)

"For about a year now I’ve been building this new office/shop/garage at my place. Being the engineer I am at heart I prewired it for video surveillance and alarm.

I found an online reseller with good prices and I purchased all the alarm components from them. www.homesecuritystore.com I installed each switch or sensor as a separate zone so later I can use this system as a whole house monitoring platform.

I decided it is time to add the video. They had good prices and I bought close to $2000 worth of quality cameras and a 16 Channel DVR.

Last weekend I started to bench test it and get familiar before I commit the installation. I noticed the box was repackaged.

Then I noticed it is still full of video. It was installed at a restaurant and then returned. Not sure if the restaurant did it themselves or they had a security professional help. In any case they gave me their weeks’ worth of video. Moreover Homesecuritystore.com didn’t verify the contents and in turn sold it to me.

I was hoping to find some incriminating footage or something to brag about. Fortunately for them it was pretty benign stuff.

Then I started to think of the possibilities of what could have happened and decided to write to them regarding their security practices.

See attached. I was surprised they just sent me a misspelled apology and are sending me a new unit. Totally dismissing my attempt to point out to them the underlying problem here.

I’m going to do a threat assessment of the linux kernel in this unit when I get a chance. These cheap DVR boxes with Dynamic DNS and internet reachability are a whole new potential platform for a hacker. A modern day Trojan horse even.

Take the following scenario for a moment:
1. I buy one of these units (or 100 each from a different internet vendor)

2. Change the linux kernel to add a few tools and backdoor username/passwords and maybe even a phone home daemon. Phone home would need to be a secure tunnel and internet proxy aware. So spoof the proxy on port 80 with ssl traffic embedded. Also use tools like Wireshark/tshark, or one of my all-time favorites: 


3. Return it to the vendor for a full refund.

4. In turn they sell the units to John Q Public or better yet a customer with other units already on premise just waiting to be exploited.

5. It gets installed and finds a routed path to the internet and updates its DNS record location dynamically.

6. Meanwhile back at the black hats cave: We see the DNS entries for these devices show up and / or our phone home packets arrived at home. The latter is riskier because it gives a deterministic home location, for that we run our APP in the cloud to obfuscate our location.

7. Login and start monitoring, gather content and exploit the target. Granted step 7 here is dependent on something good happening. I would beg to guess every video surveillance installation at one point in time or another captures illicit/illegal activity or some sort of blackmail material content.

8. The black hat could now also secure shell into the DVR over the phone home tunnel and use it as a spring board to then perform vulnerability scans internal to the video network thus finding other DVRs, IP cameras, and other trusted behind the firewall type devices. Once accessed install similar tool sets, rinse and repeat for all reachable devices.

9. Lastly a coordinated attack. You locate physical assets to steal. At a coordinated time perform a denial of service internal to their network and take out the security infrastructure. Use tools like NetCat or simple packet capture replays with tshark to confuse the lan devices and potentially crash them if not just deafen their abilities to report. ARP storms are great for this. Actually once an inventory of devise is determined fingerprint scan each and look for known vulnerabilities for those devie’s kernels. Move in and out all the while the systems are incapacitated. Ideally you want to have the devices perform self remediation on their own, avoid forcing a hang condition and do not require reboots for remediation to hide the existence that anything happened adding to the confusion of what happened and how.

Not far fetched to believe. And all from a simple buy and return to the store type activity.

"Bob, you got me thinking. All these items are made in China, right? Isn't it possible likely that secret code has already been planted in them for future use?"


On another subject:
Do you recall a police movie (maybe Beverly hill cop) where the cop submits into evidence a large permanent magnet and it takes out the surv. video evidence. Well take that same concept to data tape backups.

I recently toured an Iron Mountain Magnet tape vault and observed them picking and putting tapes in and out for customers. Much to my dismay not all customers co-locate their tapes next to their own. Many of the tapes are slotted into the next available slot intermingling them with other customer’s tapes.

They don’t even screen the boxes coming in and out for high levels of magnetic flux. So a passive magnet weighing similar to the tape that gets checked in and out over a long period of time could potentially be creating small magnet grenades to the data nearby. To be a bit more sexy make that an active magnetic device with a motion trigger. Wait for no movement with a 3d accelerometer also sense that it is not lying flat in the original box but upright as if it is in the library. I mocked up this accelerometer algorithm in a two chip device using a basic stamp.

Allow it to ‘Wake up’ and generate as large of an oscillating magnetic flux as possible and expend the batteries. If movement is sensed have it go dormant again. Cycle these rogue tapes in and out rapidly over time. To target an attack request your own tape vault location and try to steer it near your competitors location or just carpet bomb the library with multiple devices over time. Not as affective but very destructive in nature. Evil isn’t it.

Not that I would never ever do such a thing or advocate or assist anyone in this behavior. But, I can think of it and other ways to thwart simple best practices.

Just like when I was in college and I came up with the idea to use an IR laser to take out a security camera by shifting its AGC and blacking out the picture. Later in life I saw this applied in a movie. I was like HEY I thought of that a long time ago. The cameras I bought for my place have the Sony chip in them that knows how to black out bright objects selectively within the ccd field of view. Thus obsoleting this vulnerability a bit.

Well thank for your time. My mind wandered with possibilities when I realized I have that other customers video content handed to me.

Have a great day."

As you can see, "Bob" is smarter and more clever than I am. That's why I love hanging out with the "Bob's" of the world. Now I know what "Bob" knows... and now, so do you. ~Kevin

Are you thinking, "Gee, I wish I knew who this "Bob" guy was. I have a security consulting project for him. Does he do freelance work?" 

I don't know. You'll have to ask him. His name is Bob Blair and he is an engineer in Massachusetts.