The FBI has taken a computer disk and internal Ford e-mails in a continuing investigation of a former employee who was fired in June after the company found recording devices she had hidden in a building on its Dearborn, Mich., world headquarters campus.
Ford fired Sharon Leach, 43, a mechanical staff engineer who worked at Ford for 16 years, in late June after company security personnel saw her leave and return to the same conference room on multiple occasions. She told them she was recording conference meetings using the bugs...
According to court records, the FBI seized eight listening devices from Ford headquarters on July 11. It earlier had seized more than two dozen items from Leach's Wyandotte, Mich., home weeks earlier, including bank statements, tax records, a buy.com shipping bag, a Post-It note with numbers and a key chain with keys labeled "do not duplicate." (more)
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FireEye and Fox-IT have partnered to provide free keys designed to unlock systems infected by CryptoLocker.
These folks will analyze one of your locked files and send you the decode key, FREE.
SketchFactor is a navigation app that shows the relative sketchiness of an area. It's focused on improving city exploration on foot. SketchFactor empowers users to report sketchy experiences, read sketchy incidents, and get directions to where they need to go in the least sketchy way possible.
What does sketchy mean?
Sketchy means a number of different things. To you, it may mean dangerous. To someone else, it may mean weird.
What can I report?
You can report any sketchy incident you see fit. (more)
FutureWatch: If this gains traction, like Yelp, it will become a whole lot more than just a personal app. Police, criminologists, city planners, security consultants, taxi cab companies and more will find use for the data this generates. Imagine a real-time SketchFactor overlay for Google maps.
“The top secret, government, political secrets, all that top secret stuff that you kind of think about spies, probably less than 10% of what they are trying to go after.”
FBI experts say that 90% of what they go after, is industrial and trade secret espionage, and the target: students and executives from companies traveling abroad carrying trade secrets from their research and development at universities and companies.. And it's highly sought after.
“Every company, your research and development, it’s your next product down the road, and if I can steal that information and beat you to the market it's going to be devastating for you as a company.” (more) (video)
Forty years ago this Friday, Richard Nixon became the first and only president of the United States to resign from office. He signed his resignation agreement, boarded a helicopter for San Clemente, Calif., and largely retreated into the shadows of history.
A decade later, he sat down with former White House aide Frank Gannon to share his own account of his final days in the Oval Office. Segments culled from those 30 hours of interviews were aired publicly just once, on CBS News. This week, The Richard Nixon Foundation and the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum are releasing a series of clips of those interviews in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the resignation.
In the first installments of the video series entitled “A President Resigns,” the disgraced president recalls learning that the infamous tape that became known as “the smoking gun” had been released. The tape revealed that Nixon had been aware of the break-in at the Watergate, despite his repeated denials. (more)
Researchers at MIT, Microsoft, and Adobe have developed an algorithm that can reconstruct an audio signal by analyzing minute vibrations of objects depicted in video. In one set of experiments, they were able to recover intelligible speech from the vibrations of a potato-chip bag photographed from 15 feet away through soundproof glass.
In other experiments, they extracted useful audio signals from videos of aluminum foil, the surface of a glass of water, and even the leaves of a potted plant. The researchers will present their findings in a paper at this year’s Siggraph, the premier computer graphics conference.
“When sound hits an object, it causes the object to vibrate,” says Abe Davis, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and first author on the new paper. “The motion of this vibration creates a very subtle visual signal that’s usually invisible to the naked eye. People didn’t realize that this information was there.” (more)
Despite the promise of Google's Movidius-equipped Project Tango, there are still no depth-sensing, SLR-stomping smartphones on the market. But Movidius thinks that could change soon, thanks to its brand new chip: the Myriad 2 vision processor unit (VPU).
"The Myriad 2 is going to provide more than 20x the power efficiency of the Myriad 1, and enable camera features that were not possible before in mobile devices," CEO Remi El-Ouazzane tells me. If you'll recall, Tango's original tech brought faster focus, improved depth of field, near-optical zooming and higher light sensitivity to smartphone cameras (and now, tablets).
It also let researchers scan a room in 3D to provide interior navigation, among other cool tricks. (more)
From a Security Scrapbook Blue Blaze Irregular...
So, letting uncleared persons into secure facilities just became even more stupid.
With new processing chips, surreptitious video recording becomes even more dangerous.
Movidius makes the chips. And Matterport makes the 3D modelling software. This is very cool but at the same time very disturbing. How many tradecraft applications will this have? Security managers should see, at least, the Matterport video.
It is well known that USB drives can be dangerous. Companies run strict screening policies and it has long been known that running unknown ‘exe’ files is a bad idea. But what if the threat was undetectable, unfixable and could be planted into any USB device be it a USB drive, keyboard, mouse, web camera, printer, even smartphone or tablet? Well this nightmare scenario just became reality.
The findings will be laid out in a presentation next week from security researchers Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell who claim the security of USB devices is fundamentally broken. More to the point they said it has always been fundamentally broken, but the holes have only just been discovered.
BadUSB
To demonstrate this the researchers created malware called ‘BadUSB’. It can be installed on any USB device and take complete control over any PC to which it connects. This includes downloading and uploading files, tracking web history, adding infected software into installations and even controlling the keyboard so it can type commands.
“It can do whatever you can do with a keyboard, which is basically everything a computer does,” explains Nohl... (more)
The short-term solution to BadUSB isn’t a
technical patch so much as a fundamental change in how we use USB
gadgets. To avoid the attack, all you have to do is not connect your USB
device to computers you don’t own or don’t have good reason to
trust—and don’t plug untrusted USB devices into your own computer. ...or, treat USB sticks the same way you would hypodermic needles. (more)
A virus known as 'Andr/SlfMite-A' has been recently discovered that is spreading throughout the Android world through text messages (SMS)...
Andr/SlfMite-A virus sends SMSs, which includes a malicious link. If you unknowingly click on the embedded link within the SMS, then the virus easily get installed on your phone. Once the virus is downloaded onto your phone, it secretly sends text messages with malicious link to the first 20 contacts from your contact list.
These self-replicating 'worms' send SMSs to your contact list, thus playing with the trust that the receiver has in you. Just because the person from your contact thinks that the message is from you and hence is a genuine text message, they might just get tricked into clicking the link and unknowingly allow the virus to get installed onto their phone. (more)
VideoCleaner is FREE professional open-source video enhancement software. With VideoCleaner, you can brighten poorly lit scenes, increase detail clarity, correct the viewing perspective, reverse lens distortion, repairs VHS recordings, improve color contrast, isolate channels, and so much more.
VideoCleaner makes faint movements, distant traffic signal color changes, and small details obvious. You can annotate on-screen with text and highlighting, correct playback speed, provide sweeping or adjacent before-after views, and extract stills.
Being open-source means that you can customize VideoCleaner to fit your needs and delve deep into the science. Everything is free, even the support.
VideoCleaner is free without any purchase price, support or update fees. You are welcome to use VideoCleaner and its components for any legal purpose, personal or commercial, without any requirements or obligations beyond the open-source General Public License (GPL) of its components. You are free to redistribute this software in accordance with its associated GPL. (more)
Some of the engineers who used to help the Central Intelligence Agency solve problems have moved on to another challenge: determining the value of every conceivable investment in the world.
Five years ago, they started a company called Addepar, with the aim of providing clear and reliable information about the increasingly complex assets inside pensions, investment funds and family fortunes. In much the way spies diagram a communications network, Addepar filters and weighs the relationships among billions of dollars of holdings to figure out whether a portfolio is about to crash. (more)
IL - A judge has fined a Lincoln man $500 for bugging his 90-year-old mother’s phone.
Richard Stamler, 60, pleaded no contest to disturbing the peace last week, and Lancaster County District Judge Andrew Jacobsen fined him...
Stamler’s sister called police March 28, 2013, after she found a recording device in the basement of their mother’s home that had been connected to the phone line and set to record any time someone in the house picked up a phone.
She told police she recognized her brother’s voice reciting date information on the tape. He admitted to police he recorded calls on his mother's phone, but didn't think it was illegal. (more)
Was Nitin Gadkari's house bugged? The reported recovery of listening devices from Union Minister Gadkari's house has set tongues wagging in political circles, with Congress suggesting that this shows there is lack of trust among the NDA leaders. Even former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has demanded a probe into this matter.
However, this is not the first time that news of political leaders being snooped upon by their adversaries has surfaced in the media. Let's look back at some similar controversies from the past... (more)
When: 7/30/2014
From 5:00 PM until 7:00 PM
Where: Boston Bar Association
16 Beacon Street
Boston, Massachusetts
United States
Trade secret thefts, both domestic and international, cost U.S.
companies billions of dollars per year. Over 85 percent of trade secret
thefts involve employees and business partners. It is imperative to
put a trade secret protection program in place. The FBI will show you
why and how.
In a joint BBA/BPLA sponsored event, federal
enforcement specialists Carmine Nigro and Ted Distaso, Brian Moriarty of
Hamilton Brook Smith Reynolds, P.C., and Russell Beck of Beck Reed
Riden LLP discuss methods of trade secret theft and best practices in
theft prevention. (more) (register)
FYI - Just up the street from:
Cheers (pub)
84 Beacon St.
Boston, MA 02108
"Where everybody knows your name." (But that's another privacy issue.)
