Ex-Sheriff Pleads Guilty to Wiretapping

WV - Former Clay County Sheriff Miles Slack pleaded guilty Tuesday to a federal charge that he hacked his wife’s work computer.

Slack entered the plea to a wiretapping charge Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Charleston. He faces up to five years in prison. Sentencing was set for Dec. 19.

The government said Slack secretly installed a keystroke logger on a computer in the Clay County Magistrate Court office in April where his wife worked. They were married at the time but have since divorced.

Spyware devices can be purchased online and typically are 1-2 inches long and attached to the keyboard cable. Once installed, they can intercept anything typed on that keyboard. (more)

Afraid of Getting a Virus from a Public Recharging Station?

 For every scare, there is an inventor with an answer...
via int3.cc...

Have you ever plugged your phone into a strange USB port because you really needed a charge and thought: "Gee who could be stealing my data?." We all have needs and sometimes you just need to charge your phone. "Any port in a storm." as the saying goes. Well now you can be a bit safer. "USB Condoms" prevent accidental data exchange when your device is plugged in to another device with a USB cable. USB Condoms achieve this by cutting off the data pins in the USB cable and allowing only the power pins to connect through.Thus, these "USB Condoms" prevent attacks like "juice jacking".

Use USB-Condoms to:
* Charge your phone on your work computer without worrying...
* Use charging stations in public without worrying...

If you're going to run around plugging your phone into strange USB ports, at least be safe about it. ;-) (more)

New iPhones Are Coming - Learn How to Sanitize Your Old One

Planning on buying a new iPhone? 

Whether you trade-in, sell or gift your old one, do this first. Erase all your personal data. 

Here's how:
1. Plug your phone into the charger, or make sure you have enough charge to complete the process.
2. Take a moment to back-up the phone. iTunes or iCloud make this easy.
3. Go to SETTINGS > GENERAL > RESET
4. Press ERASE ALL CONTENT AND SETTINGS. Press CONFIRM.
5. (Optional) Press all the other RESETS.
6. Double-check to make sure all your data has gone to the bit-bucket in the sky.

Enjoy your new phone!

How Law Enforcement Can Watch Tweets in Real-time

BlueJay, the "Law Enforcement Twitter Crime Scanner," provides real-time, geo-fenced access to every single public tweet so that local police can keep tabs on #gunfire, #meth and #protest (yes, those are real examples) in their communities. 

BlueJay is the product of BrightPlanet, whose tagline is "Deep Web Intelligence" and whose board is populated with people like Admiral John Poindexter of Total Information Awareness infamy.

BlueJay allows users to enter a set of Twitter accounts, keywords and locations to scan for within 25-mile geofences (BlueJay users can create up to five such fences), then it returns all matching tweets in real-time. If the tweets come with GPS locations, they are plotted on a map. The product can also export databases of up to 100,000 matching tweets at a time. (more)

New Mobile Survey Reveals 41% of Employees Are Deliberately Leaking Confidential Data

Congratulations and condolences to the nation’s CIOs for being responsible for data security. 

There’s now more job security but now there’s less information security too. Because, according to a new survey from uSamp, 41% of workers used an unsanctioned cloud service for document storage in the last 6 months, despite the fact that 87% of these workers knew their company had policies forbidding such practices.

Welcome to the mobile workplace. It’s less secure and loaded with risk.

And, according to the research, the estimated annual cost to remedy the data loss is about $1.8 billion. So what’s a CIO to do? On the one hand, it’s her job to help employees remain productive, but it’s also her job to secure the company’s confidential information.

Six IT experts were asked about their take on the matter, here are their suggestions... (more) 

Security Directors: FREE Security White Paper - "Surreptitious Workplace Recording ...and what you can do about it."   

"Secure" Integrated Circuit Chip Salami'ed into Spilling Secrets

A technique has been developed to bypass elaborate physical protections and siphon data off the most secure chips potentially including those used to protect military secrets.

The proof-of-concept technique demonstrated by researchers at Berlin's Technical University and security consultancy IOActive was successfully applied to a low-security Atmel chip commonly used in TiVo video recording devices. But the research team found that their complex and expensive attack could be applied to successfully pry data from highly-secure chips.

The attack used a polishing machine to mill down the silicon on the target chip until it was 30 micrometers thin.

The chip was then placed under a laser microscope fitted with an infrared camera to observe heat emanating from where encryption algorithms were running.

A focused ion-beam was then shot at the chip which dug a series of two micrometer -deep trenches in which wiretap probes were inserted.

Together, the elaborate techniques if bolstered by the use of more expensive equipment not available to the researchers could potentially bypass the most advanced chip security mechanisms. (more)

SpyCam Nails Airline Baggage Handlers at JFK

Seven baggage handlers at JFK Airport were arrested Wednesday for allegedly stealing thousand of dollars in items from checked baggage.

After receiving customer complaints of missing items, Israeli airline EL AL installed a camera in the belly of one of their 747 jets.

Over a five month period they caught seven employees - often wearing gloves - rifling through passenger's suitcases and stuffing luxury items in their pockets and down their pants. (more)

Sports Spying - Italian Football

Italy - In a frankly bizarre twist, Sampdoria caught a Genoa scout dressed in camouflage gear spying on their training ahead of Sunday’s derby.

The two local rivals will face off at Marassi on Sunday.

It seems Genoa were hoping to gain an advantage, but were left red-faced when Primavera youth team goalkeeping Coach Luca De Prà was caught spying on Samp’s training session.

It was Sampdoria who revealed the strange story with a statement on their official website and photograph of the man dressed in full camouflage gear to hide in the bushes outside the Bogliasco camp. (more)

Wizard of Id... More True than They Know

Alps Slayings Could be Linked to Industrial Espionage - Prosecutor

French authorities said Friday they were investigating the possibility that the British family shot dead while on holidays in the Alps a year ago was executed over industrial espionage. (more)

School v. Students - Monitoring Social Media for Anti-Social Behavior

Authorities in California are now snooping on school students’ social media postings to catch law-breaking, bullying and other harmful activities. But parents worry the move is yet another example of Big Brother prying into ordinary Americans’ lives.

Glendale Unified School District, the third-largest in Los Angeles County, has paid Geo Listening Company over $40,000 to follow its students on social media networks. The stated aim is to prevent law-breaking, bullying and doing harm to themselves and others.

Under the scheme, the online activities of Glendale’s 13,000 middle-school and high-school students are closely monitored. (more)

Sometimes the Bird Really is a Spy

Over the past few years there have been a flock of spy stories about birds, the latest being a stork in Egypt. He was interrogated and let go, only to be found dead two days later. "...a wildlife organization claiming that it was 'eaten by local villagers.'" (more)

This story is different. Some birds do spy.

The John Downer Productions team created a set of highly realistic robotic penguins to spy on living birds for a recent BBC documentary. Some penguins are timid around humans, and may flee when a normal camera team approaches. So, these robots allow scientists and filmmakers to get up close with the colony and capture intimate details of day to day life in a penguin colony. 

The robots are more than simple spycams. They can:
• Remember the identities of individual penguins based on their patterns of spots.
• Get blown over and right themselves.
• Fall off a ledge without breaking.
• And even carry “egg-cams” to drop off at strategic locations (more)

Business Espionage: BMW Accused of Spying on Paris Electric Car-Share Company

The group that runs Paris car-sharing scheme Autolib’ said Tuesday it had filed a criminal complaint accusing German carmaker BMW of using spies to gather information on its electric cars. 

The Bollore group said it had filed the industrial espionage complaint after two employees of a firm employed by BMW were spotted three times tampering with charging points and Autolib’ vehicles parked in Paris.

BMW denied any wrongdoing...

The group that runs Paris car-sharing scheme Autolib’ said Tuesday it had filed a criminal complaint accusing German carmaker BMW of using spies to gather information on its electric cars.

The Bollore group said it had filed the industrial espionage complaint after two employees of a firm employed by BMW were spotted three times tampering with charging points and Autolib’ vehicles parked in Paris.

BMW denied any wrongdoing.

How to Check an iPhone for Spyware

a tip via Techlicious...
"The best way to detect if your iPhone has been hacked is to download an app like Lookout that tells you whether your phone has been "jailbroken". 

If the answer is yes (and you didn't jailbreak it), there's a good chance your suspected spy did. 

To remove an iPhone hack, simply update to the latest version of iOS. And to protect against future hacks, make sure that your phone is password protected so no one can get physical access to jailbreak it again...

Once you clear the hack, reset all of your passwords for social accounts and iCloud to prevent other means of spying on you."

The New York Times Quote of the Day :)

QUOTATION OF THE DAY

"This is the golden age of spying."

PAUL KOCHER, a cryptographer, on the National Security Agency's ability to circumvent encryption systems in gathering private Internet information.