FutureWatch - "It's just our new 'know yer customer' policy, mate."

Australia - Somewhere in Perth's central business district is a building containing the names, ages, addresses, photographs and unique fingerprint codes of thousands of revellers who danced and drank at Sydney's Home nightclub last year.

 

Home, in Darling Harbour, began trialling a biometric ID scanning entry system nine months ago. Patrons lined up before six large terminals to have their photo taken, and their driver's licence and right index fingerprint scanned. The information was copied and sent to Western Australia, where it is stored on a secured central database by the system developers.

While Home is the only NSW venue to use fingerprint technology at present - there are 13 nationwide - various forms of ID scanning are being quietly rolled out at other nightspots. (more)

"Sheila, if we didn't do this you might get carried off by an alien. It's for your own good, you know, not to mention limiting our liability."  

It may take a decade or so, but once this generation has been privacy desensitized the concept of a business 'knowing the customer' as they enter the establishment will become more commonplace. 

Personal security won't be the only reason. Think about the counter-shoplifting possibilities. When businesses network their customer knowledge, mobile shoplifting gangs will find it harder to operate. 

The marketing mantra... "This enhances and customizes your experience with us."

I Spied (We'll miss you.)

Robert Culp, the veteran actor best known for starring with Bill Cosby in the classic 1960s espionage-adventure series "I Spy" and for playing Bob in the 1969 movie "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice," died Wednesday morning. He was 79.

Culp fell and hit his head while taking a walk outside his Hollywood Hills home. He was found by a jogger who called 911 and was pronounced dead at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles, said Lt. Bob Binder of the Los Angeles Police Department. An autopsy is pending.

"My mind wants to flow into sadness, but I want to stay above that," Cosby told The Times on Wednesday. (more)

Australia Week at KSS continues...

The Queensland government has tipped $14 million into wiretapping capabilities to support new phone interception powers handed to police last year. (more)

Plant a bug, grow a business? You decide.

Australia - A Sunshine Coast jury will decide the fate today of two women and a son who placed a fake bug in the home of a Nambour woman with mental health issues.

In each of their recorded police interviews, which were shown during a Maroochydore District Court trial over the past two days, they said they thought planting the bug would “help” the woman, who believed someone was monitoring her.

They took $100 from the woman’s daughter for removing the bug, which was a circuit board and wiring they obtained from a Mooloolaba surveillance store.

Kathleen Joan Kitchner, 54, and Corinne Martell, 47, from Private Eyes007, and Ms Martell’s son, Shane Robert Martell, 26, have pleaded not guilty to attempted fraud.

Their defence barrister has told the jury that “the reason the bug was placed there” should be the issue in their deliberations.

He said while the Crown argued the women planted the fake listening device with a view to getting further business through installation of a surveillance system and possibly security patrols, they had other motives.

The women were hired after Cheryl Metcalf called them to sweep her mother’s home for cameras and bugs in June, 2008. (more)

Bug Found on Activist's Phone Line

Australia - The former fashion designer Prue Acton, who is campaigning to save a koala colony from logging in a south-east forest, has discovered a bugging device in her phone.

The MP3 recorder was found by chance three weeks ago when Ms Acton, pictured, and her partner, the artist Merv Moriarty, received a delivery of water on their property at Wallagoot near Bega.

When the truck arrived, it ran over the Telstra pit (an underground phone junction box) on the track leading to their home.

The couple noticed their email had stopped working so Mr Moriarty went to check the pit. "He and the tanker driver pulled off the broken top and saw some strange devices attach to the phone lines but didn't realise they were listening devices," Ms Acton said.

Telstra fixed the line hours later, but the next day a detective from Bega police arrived.

"She came out to ask us first whether either of us were having an affair and bugging the phone. Hilarious! She next said a recording device, not a broadcasting device, had been found on the line."

The device was sent to Sydney for forensic examination, but Ms Acton said that because she had not been threatened directly, police were not giving the matter high priority.

She had no idea who might have installed the bug, but said it would not stop her from battling Forests NSW over logging in the Mumbulla and Murrah state forests near Bermagui.

Insight 

• Most bugging devices are found by accident. 

Imagine how many would be found if high-risk individuals and businesses hired a professional counterespionage consultant to look of them.

China Holds 4 Australians for Espionage Trial

Australia - Australian mining executive Stern Hu admitted to receiving bribes of up to 6 million yuan ($960,000) during a sensational opening day of the trial of four Rio Tinto executives in China yesterday... The four Rio executives were arrested on July 5 last year and charged with bribery and stealing state secrets, a charge that was later downgraded to stealing business secrets... The charges of stealing business secrets could add up to seven years to any bribery sentences, if they are found guilty. (more)

"Fair dinkum, money's no object!"

Australia - The general manager of a council in Sydney's inner-west has admitted spending council funds to employ a surveillance company to follow a man he feared was involved with his wife... It is alleged Mr Romano used council funds to pay for security expenses for personal purposes. Mr Romano has told the inquiry he spent more than $44,000 to conduct surveillance on a man he believed may have been harassing his family. The inquiry also heard Mr Romano thought the man was involved with his wife. (more)

Catch an E-Mail Snoop Yourself

via Erik Larkin, PC World...

Your Web mail account is a treasure trove of private and potentially valuable information -- and thieves know it... Normally you can't tell whether you've been hacked... Even if you cannily leave a juicy-sounding e-mail unread, a thief or snoop may read it and then return its status to unread. But with a little bit of know-how, you can create an electronic trip wire that will trigger whenever someone reads a rigged e-mail... The gist of it is to keep an e-mail message in your account that includes the code for a counter. Opening the attachment trips the counter, thereby alerting you that someone was snooping. (how-to details)

Better than a Sharp Stick in the Eye Alarm System

The Snow Queen or The Emporer's New Clothes? You decide.

From those wonderful folks who brought us Hans Christian Andersen...

“Dry” fog from PROTECT A/S obscures everything in protected areas in less than 20 seconds after a break-in. When activated, the fog generator produces dense but harmless fog and making thieves flee the way they got in. Because thieves cannot steal what they cannot see!

A PROTECT™ Fog Cannon completes the “circle of protection” when used with conventional burglar alarms, giving customers an additional sense of security. (more) (actual break-in video)

A competing product, FlashFog, also has some great surveillance and demo videos worth viewing.

Looks pretty cool. I'll go with Snow Queen.

World's Smallest Autofocus

LensVector Inc. has developed an autofocus technology that may make cameras again a main focal point on mobile phones.

LensVector’s autofocus device, which the company says is the smallest ever, sheers and focuses light using LCD technology. And, very importantly, it has no moving parts. LensVector has its sights set on cameras for cell phones, laptops and other mobile devices. (more)

(FutureWatch) ...like contact lenses for microbots or telephoto lenses for spycams, perhaps?

Your espionage is wildly successful. What's next?

China's relationship with foreign companies is starting to sour, as tougher government policies and intensifying domestic competition combine to make one of the world's most important markets less friendly to multinationals.

Interviews with executives, lawyers, and consultants with long experience in China point to developments they say are making it much harder for many foreign companies to succeed. They say the changes suggest Beijing is reassessing China's long-standing emphasis on opening its economy to foreign business—epitomized by the changes it made to join the World Trade Organization in 2001—and tilting toward promoting dominant state companies. (more)

“There are louder voices pushing China to be more protectionist and to be more nationalist.” Lester Ross, managing partner in Beijing for WilmerHale law firm

The International Monetary Fund on Wednesday lent its support to calls by the United States for China to allow its "much undervalued" currency to rise, amid EU complaints of protectionism. (more)

Murray Associates / Spybusters featured in the Tektronix March 2010 Newsletter

Case Study: 
Spybusters Tracks Down Hidden Eavesdropping Devices 

New technologies are making it easier than ever to listen in on private conversations. High-tech bugs are easy to plant and hard to detect, and are turning up in boardrooms and offices where they are not wanted. Learn how Spybusters LLC, a firm that specializes in detecting and removing surveillance devices, used Tektronix Real-Time Spectrum Analyzers to keep clients' offices bug-free. (Tektronix newsletter) (full story)

Password Whacker now a 100x Faster Cracker

Password-cracking tools optimised to work with SSDs (solid state drives) have achieved speeds up to 100 times quicker than previously possible.

After optimising its rainbow tables of password hashes to make use of SSDs Swiss security firm Objectif Sécurité was able to crack 14-digit WinXP passwords with special characters in just 5.3 seconds. Objectif Sécurité's Philippe Oechslin told Heise Security that the result was 100 times faster than possible with their old 8GB Rainbow Tables for XP hashes.

The exercise illustrated that the speed of hard discs rather than processor speeds was the main bottleneck in password cracking based on password hash lookups. (more)

If Tiger Woods' cell phone had this...

...he would be working on his putts today.

(from the manufacturer's press release...)

FlexiSHIELD is software for cell phones that effectively creates an 'invisibility' shield for your phone, protecting SMS, EMAIL, MMS, Phone Logs and actual Phone Calls from prying eyes.

For any phone number, or Contact that you specify, FlexiSHIELD will automatically hide any incoming or outgoing SMS, MMS, EMAIL, Phone Logs and actual Phone Calls in an invisible vault on the phone itself.

When installed and activated, there is no indication of the application, and all message and call notifications are suppressed, making FlexiSHIELD totally invisible in operation. (more)

No, it won't work on your iPhone or BlackBerry. Currently, it is only compatible with Windows Mobile / Nokia cell phones. Yes, these are the same people who make the cell phone spyware.

FutureWatch... It will be interesting to see how this development affects law enforcement, cell phone forensic investigations.

"How small are GSM bugs?"

A. They can be as small as a Compact Flash card.

This is a question I hear frequently, along with...

"How expensive are they?" 

($20 to $80)

"Where are people getting these?" 

(ebay and on-line spy shops)

"How do they work?" 

Plug in a SIM card and hide it. Call the listening device using any phone, from anywhere in the world. Or... some models will call, or text, you whenever it hears someone in the vicinity talking!

"How do you find them?" 

In 2009, Murray Associates developed a proprietary test - Digital Surveillance Location Analysis™ (DSLA™) - which plots the location of these normally dormant devices on a computer screen map, using triangulation.