Two FREE Security Book Offers for Potential Clients

Free books are a great way to get to know who you are dealing with, before you decide to deal with them!

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While international travel has come to a screeching halt due to COVID-19, the threat of economic and industrial espionage continues to proliferate. 

In fact, due to the global pandemic, intellectual property (IP) and business intelligence (BI) is more valuable than ever to foreign governments and business competitors, looking to gain an economic advantage in the marketplace. 

Among Enemies: Counter-Espionage for the Business Traveler, by Luke Bencie, is a valuable textbook. It should be read by, "corporate executives, defense contractors, lawyers, academics, military personnel, diplomats and virtually anyone else who travels with important information, how to protect their themselves and their interests."

It has a 4.4 out of 5 star rating on Amazon, and 25 excellent reviews. You may purchase a copy there. Visit Luke's website (smiconsultancy.com/) first. If his services can help your organization, request a complimentary copy.

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This informative bundle should also be on every security director's desk...

Is My Cell Phone Bugged?: Everything You Need to Know to Keep Your Mobile Conversations Private (Coincidentally, This book also has a 4.4 out of 5 star rating on Amazon, and 25 excellent reviews.)

The Security Director's Guide to Discussing TSCM with Management

Both are available to Murray Associates potential clients. Complimentary. No obligation. No follow-up sales call unless you request it.

Visit counterespionage.com to learn how to detect and deter electronic surveillance and corporate espionage. Click here to request you complimentary bundle.

Accurate knowledge is the first step in protecting your privacy and valuable information. Contact us through our websites, today.  (offer expires 10/31/2020)

Make Google Street View Myopic When it Looks at Your Home

Google Street View offers up a window to the world in all its bizarre, intimate, and often raw glory. That window just so happens to peek into your home, as well. What that peek reveals may be more than you've bargained for — think views into bedroom windows, potential fodder for stalkers, and more.

Thankfully, there is something you can do about it. Specifically, you can ask Google to permanently blur your house out — leaving only a smeared suggestion of a building in its place. The entire process is surprisingly easy...

Here's what you do:

1. Go to Google Maps and enter your home address

2. Enter into Street View mode by dragging the small yellow human-shaped icon, found in the bottom-right corner of the screen, onto the map in front of your house

3. With your house in view, click "Report a problem" in the bottom-right corner of the screen

4. Center the red box on your home, and select "My home" in the "Request blurring" field

5. Write in the provided field why you want the image blurred (for example, you may be concerned about safety issues)

6. Enter in your email address, and click "Submit"

And, when you're done with that, do the same thing on Bing Maps (the process is surprisingly similar). more

Report: U.S. Could Counter Un-Democratic Uses of Surveillance Tech

The U.S. government should take a more active role in responding to the use of surveillance technology by authoritarian and repressive nations such as China, according to a new report.

The Center for New American Security published a report Thursday outlining steps the U.S. government should take to ensure surveillance technologies do not become abusive. The report suggests federal agencies, including the State Department and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, should research and fund the development of technology solutions that would preserve users’ data privacy. more

Security Scrapbook Flashback: September 1, 1998

Security Scrapbook Extra - Internet Privacy and Security
Tue, 01 Sep 1998

Review from the September 1998 issue of PC World magazine... 

Privacy for Sale: How Computerization Has Made Everyone's Private Life an Open Secret
by Jeffrey Rothfeder

Medical histories, bank balances, even unlisted phone numbers--the details of your life are brokered online every day. "Privacy is like clean air," says Kevin Murray, who runs Murray Associates, a New Jersey–based firm that sweeps clients' offices for bugs and other surveillance equipment. "At one time there was plenty of it. Now it's almost gone."

Open Mike Strikes Out

As the New York Mets and Miami Marlins mulled over whether to play a game on Thursday night, a man who appeared to be Mets general manager Brodie Van Wagenen unknowingly let the public know of a plan from Major League Baseball.

Cameras were rolling on the Mets' page of the MLB app Thursday afternoon and picked up a candid conversation from someone believed to be the Mets general manager.

"Baseball is trying to come up with a solution," the man says. "You know what would be super powerful?"

The man then pauses to tell the two people he's speaking to that this doesn't leave the room, unaware that the camera is rolling. more

National Security Concerns — Executive Orders Against TikTok

President Trump issued two executive orders late Thursday against China-based TikTok and messaging app WeChat, citing national security concerns in a sweeping order that could prevent the companies from doing most business in the United States....

“This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage,” the TikTok order reads. more

Android: Camera Can Remain Active When Phone is Locked

Mozilla says it will fix the bug later this year, in October.

Mozilla says it's working on fixing a bug in Firefox for Android that keeps the smartphone camera active even after users have moved the browser in the background or the phone screen was locked.

The bug was first spotted and reported to Mozilla a year ago, in July 2019, by an employee of video delivery platform Appear TV.

The bug manifests when users chose to video stream from a website loaded in Firefox instead of a native app. more

The Atlas of Surveillance

Documenting Police Tech in Our Communities. 

Explore 5,300 datapoints in the U.S. collected by hundreds of researchers.

TOGGLE the Legend to reveal how each technology is spreading. ZOOM into any region to see the technologies in greater detail. If an area has no markers, it means it hasn't been researched yet.

Click to enlarge. Go to website to explore. Wired article here.

Google to Restrict Ads for Spycams and More

Google is set to announce a major overhaul of its ad policy starting next month.

In a blog post, Google has said that the changes specifically framed to put restrictions on advertisements promoting surveillance technologies that let people secretly spy on their intimate partners will be made into the Enabling Dishonest Behavior policy on August 11.

“The updated policy will prohibit the promotion of products or services that are marketed or targeted with the express purpose of tracking or monitoring another person or their activities without their authorization.”, the Alphabet-owned company said in its blog. Google said the updated policies will be applicable globally as soon as it will be brought into effect starting August 11. more

Privacy Advocates Alert: Make Orwell Fiction Again

more

Why Law Firms Need TSCM More Than Ever

Law firms are still the firm favorites and proverbial jewel in the crown for cyber criminals. 

Hackers for hire can be extremely useful for some people and organizations. Although the report by the University of Toronto revealed that Dark Basin had infact conducted commercial espionage on behalf of clients against opponents involved in high profile public events.

But their work didn’t stop there. They also worked on criminal cases, financial transactions, news stories and advocacy in an attempt to throw doubt on prosecutions. more

TSCM - Technical Surveillance Countermeasures / Bug Sweep / Information Security Audit

Novel Eavesdropping Attack or The Bright Spy

The usual way of eavesdropping with a glass over the wall has come a long way: bugs in the wall, hacking weak passwords, wiretaps, and more. Now, as if there weren't enough ways of being an audio spy, the good old light bulb has become a nemesis to be feared: Any light bulb in a room that is visible from the window can be used to spy on your conversations from afar.

A team of researchers at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel has found that the vibration patterns in a light bulb can enable us to recover full conversations from hundreds of feet away.

But how can that be possible? The thing about the hanging bulb is that it acts both as a diaphragm and transducer. Apparently, these two, sound waves cascading on its surface and it converting air pressure from sound to small changes in light, means it is a useful gadget for intruders.

The paper states, "We show how fluctuations in the air pressure on the surface of the hanging bulb (in response to sound), which cause the bulb to vibrate very slightly (a millidegree vibration), can be exploited by eavesdroppers to recover speech and singing, passively, externally, and in real time." more

Senate Panel Says U.S. Telecoms Failed to Prevent Chinese Spying

The federal government failed for nearly two decades to properly guard against the cybersecurity risks posed by Chinese government-owned telecoms operating in the United States, a Senate report released this morning finds.

That resulted in four of China’s largest such telecom companies being able to operate subsidiaries here with almost no oversight, according to the report from the Senate Homeland Security Committee’s investigations panel.

It might also have allowed them to help the Chinese government spy on reams of data from U.S. companies by routing their phone and Internet traffic through China, the report finds. more

Lawsuit Disputes Google's Private or Incognito Mode

Search engine behemoth Google found itself in the middle of a proposed class action lawsuit filed in California for invading the privacy of users even when they are browsing the web in what is called the private or incognito mode.

The $5 billion class action suit alleges that the tech giant collects user's data by tracking his activity on the web even in the private mode through Google Analytics, Google Ad Manager and website plug-ins, a Reuters report said.

Users normally login through the incognito mode assuming that it's safe as their search history isn't being tracked. The petitioners have alleged that Google collects the private data even as the users are under the impression that their data is safe and that amounts to misrepresentation. more

Sheriff’s Office Communications Specialist Charged with Spying on Roommate

A Florida sheriff’s office employee hid a camera in his roommate’s bedroom to spy on her, authorities said.

Llewellyn Berkheiser III, a 28-year-old communication specialist for the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, was busted Saturday after his roommate found a GoPro camera in a vent in her bedroom, according to an arrest report obtained by the Orlando Sentinel.

Berkheiser’s roommate, who was not identified, told deputies she discovered the recording device Friday when she noticed she couldn’t see light in the vent from an adjoining kitchen that was usually visible, deputies said. more

German Intelligence Gets Wiener Schnitzel'ed

In the world of online spying, great power lies with those who can get their hands on the data flowing through the world’s Internet infrastructure.

So the fact that Germany is home to one of the world’s biggest Internet exchange points—where data crosses between the networks that make up the Internet—has given a lot of power to the country’s equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency.

The Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND, gets to freely sift through all the foreign traffic passing through that exchange junction in search of nuggets that can be shared with overseas partners such as the NSA. But now that power is in jeopardy, thanks to a Tuesday ruling from Germany’s constitutional court...

“With its decision, the Federal Constitutional Court has clarified for the first time that the protection afforded by fundamental rights vis-à-vis German state authority is not restricted to the German territory,” the court said in a statement.

The German chapter of Reporters Without Borders, which brought the case in partnership with the Berlin-based Society for Civil Rights (GFF) and a few other journalists’ associations, is overjoyed. more

Alliance Trust Savings Censured After Whistleblower’s ‘Spying’ Concerns

A Dundee-based financial firm has been censured by the Information Commissioner over the use of a mobile app which allowed it to access an “excessive amount” of employees’ sensitive personal data...

Alex Forootan, 36, began investigating after receiving an unexpected text message from Microsoft saying someone had attempted to access his email account.

Mr Forootan worked as a database administrator at ATS’s Dundee headquarters between October 2017 and October last year and is set to take the company to an employment tribunal next month.

He recently rejected a £10,000 pay out from ATS over the issue, citing concerns about his ability to raise it to public attention should he accept. more

Pew Comments on Relationship Health - It Stinks

Most Americans think snooping on a partner’s phone is a bad thing to do, but that hasn’t stopped more than a third of people in committed relationships from doing it anyway, according to Pew research published Friday.

Of those surveyed, 34 percent of people in committed relationships admitted to snooping on their partner’s phone without their knowledge. Interestingly, the survey also found that 42 percent of women (who are in relationships) say they’ve snooped through their current partners’ phones without them knowing, while just 25 percent of men say they have.

As many of us find ourselves cooped up with our partners and our phones for the foreseeable future, the researchers suggest that using this technology is not necessarily great for the health of our long-term relationships. more

Spycam Detection Course | Now With Korean Closed Captions

The highly rated Spycam Detection video training course now has Korean closed captions, as well as English. Spanish is coming soon.

The demand for a Korean translation was fueled by their epidemic spy camera problem. They even have a special word for it, Molka. The problem is so bad the government created special inspection squads and a safety handbook for the public.

In other countries the problem is also epidemic.

This one-hour, self-paced course was originally created for businesses and other organizations to train their security and facilities employees. Having these people conduct periodic inspections reduces risk and legal exposure. A Certificate-of-Completion is awarded at the end.

The training is also beneficial for police, private investigators and executive protection professionals.

Personal protection is the most effective prevention. Knowing what to look for is important. The course is open to everyone. Any individual with a little knowledge can conduct their own inspections of:

• hotel rooms,
• public restroom,
• store changing rooms,
• locker rooms,
• vacation rentals,
• and their own domiciles.

Please forward this post to anyone it can help.
As more people become knowledgeable, fewer people will become victims.

A Sad Case Highlights Perception of Privacy Loss and Mental Health

WA - A suicidal man who was shot and killed by police officers at a Loves truck stop in Ritzville called police twice to report that his car was bugged and that he was being tracked, according to a release by the Columbia Basin Investigative Team.  more