Yet Another Way Your Smartphone Can Bug You

MEMS gyroscopes found on modern smart phones are sufficiently sensitive to measure acoustic signals in the vicinity of the phone. The resulting signals contain only very low-frequency information (< 200 Hz). Nevertheless we show, using signal processing and machine learning, that this information is sufficient to identify speaker information and even parse speech. 

Since iOS and Android require no special permissions to access the gyro, our results show that apps and active web content that cannot access the microphone can nevertheless eavesdrop on speech in the vicinity of the phone. (more)

Information Security Management - Distance Learning Course

Your information assets have never been more crucial, more valuable, or more at risk. This is why information security is becoming a crucial business priority in many organizations. Moreover, complying with (international) information standards and guidelines (such as the NIST Handbook, ISO 17799, CobiT, and ITIL Security Management) is becoming a hot issue worldwide.
This unique distance learning course provides you with vital information for developing or reviewing your information security management framework. The course will help you determine the levels of risk your organization is facing and the steps you will need to take to provide adequate protection.
 
The course will be of particular benefit to:

• CIOs, CISOs and anyone who has direct line responsibility for information security
• Business Continuity Planners, Asset Managers, Risk Managers
• Legal Advisors and Corporate Security Consultants
• Company Secretaries, Finance Directors and Auditors (more)

Weird - Spies Strike

Soldiers from Israel's elite wire-tapping unit are refusing to spy on Palestinians in a rebuke to prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

More than 40 former soldiers and current army reservists have signed a letter refusing future service in the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) military intelligence wing, known as Unit 8200.

Unit 8200 is often compared to the United States National Security Agency. It uses sophisticated technology to monitor the lives of Palestinians, gathering information which is then used by Israel's military. It also carries out surveillance overseas. (more)

Taylor Swift - Worried About Wiretaps

In a wide-ranging interview with Rolling Stone, Taylor Swift gets candid about her love life, her professional feuds and being very cautious about janitors and wiretapping.

1. She's pretty much always worried about privacy
Swift is acutely aware that people are out to invade her privacy. “There's someone whose entire job it is to figure out things that I don't want the world to see,” she told Rolling Stone. She's also paranoid about basically anyone she lets get too close... I have to stop myself from thinking about how many aspects of technology I don't understand.” (more)

Taylor, there are some nice professional privacy consultants who can help you.

Business Espionage - "Morticia, they've kidnapped Thing!"

T-Mobile US sued Huawei for corporate espionage, alleging that the vendor's employees illegally photographed and tried to steal parts of a robot it developed in its labs, called "Tappy," to test cell phones.

Tappy's Grandfather

The lawsuit, filed last week in federal court in Seattle, claims that two Huawei employees gained illicit access to its lab in Bellevue, Wash., photographed the robotic arm, tried to smuggle parts of it out of the lab, and then tried to sneak back in after they were banned from the facility...

In 2012 and 2013, the suit claims, Huawei employees engaged in the subterfuge. At one point, the suit alleges, a Huawei engineer put one of the robot's simulated fingertips into his laptop bag. Huawei "ultimately admitted that its employees misappropriated parts and information about T-Mobile's robot," the suit says. (more)

Yet Another Landlord Spying on Tenant Story

...also charged with having guns in his home which he's not allowed to have based on his criminal history.

Last year at this time (9/29/13) subject was sentenced to probation for a term of seven years with the condition that he have no contact with minors, and a fine of $2000, for the offense of Corruption of Minors. (more)

Russia: Fireball Over Wyoming Wasn't Spy Satellite

Russia - The Defense Ministry has challenged reports that a Kobalt-M spy satellite reentered the Earth's atmosphere and burnt up over the U.S., potentially leaving Russian military intelligence photos lying in Colorado or Wyoming...

The satellite, launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome near Arkhangelsk on May 6, was not equipped to digitally transmit its photographs back to its handlers at Russia's military intelligence unit, the GRU. Instead, it was designed to drop its film in special canisters from space onto Russian territory.

Interfax reported Tuesday that the satellite may have been attempting to position itself to drop a canister back to Earth, when it moved into too low of an orbit — thereby falling back to earth over the U.S. It is possible that much of the satellite and its photos survived, and are now sitting somewhere in the U.S. midwest. (more)

Footage as it passed over Atyrau, Kazakhstan...

Industrial Espionage Becomes a Booming Trade

Namibia - A new crime trend has emerged in Windhoek, where confidential business information is stolen and sold to the victim’s competitors...

City Police Senior Superintendent Gerry Shikesho told Namibian Sun that so far three cases of theft of business secrets have been opened - one last month and two this month.

He explained that people are being sent to steal documentation that contains company strategies or business plans.

He said a Windhoek company had information stolen that was valued at N$300 000 ($27,242.00 USD). (more)

Note: In Namibia, that is a lot of money for a business to lose.

Join Us for Our Next Exciting Adventure... Google Toggle... or, Pain in the Glass

Not a fan of Google Glass’s ability to turn ordinary humans into invisibly recording surveillance cyborgs? Now you can create your own “glasshole-free zone.”

Berlin artist Julian Oliver has written a simple program called Glasshole.sh that detects any Glass device attempting to connect to a Wi-Fi network based on a unique character string that he says he’s found in the MAC addresses of Google’s augmented reality headsets.

Install Oliver’s program on a Raspberry Pi or Beaglebone mini-computer and plug it into a USB network antenna, and the gadget becomes a Google Glass detector, sniffing the local network for signs of Glass users.  

When it detects Glass, it uses the program Aircrack-NG to impersonate the network and send a “deauthorization” command, cutting the headset’s Wi-Fi connection. It can also emit a beep to signal the Glass-wearer’s presence to anyone nearby. (more)

Lawmaker Lunacy Comes Off Half Cox'ed

The son-in-law of the late President Richard Nixon gave a lesson during a visit to Syracuse Wednesday on the difference between Watergate and the New York Republican Party's recent bugging scandal. One tactic was legal. The other was not, said Ed Cox, the chairman of the New York State Republican Party and the husband of former first daughter Tricia Nixon...

It was exposed recently that Assembly Republicans, led by Oswego County's Assemblyman Will Barclay, had a private investigator put a GPS tracking device on a car driven by Assemblyman Edward Hennessey, D-Suffolk County to track his whereabouts.

They admitted to it in court...
Cox, who was in Syracuse Wednesday, said the two investigations are not the same.
First of all, Assembly Republicans admitted to bugging the car. 

Secondly, it was legal, he said (although he admits he doesn't know any more about the law than what he's been told by a reporter.)

He talked about bugging the car as if it was the Republican Party's responsibility. He said it is part of the "self-policing, democratic process" for one party to investigate the other party's candidate before the election.

"Watergate was using illegal means - breaking and entering and illegal bugging - in order to find out what was legal political conversation. It's just the opposite," he said.

Cox said politics in New York is a competitive sport. "It ain't bean bag," he said...

What would he say if someone bugged his car?

Under the same circumstances, he said, "Sure that would be fine with me." (more)

You Like Business Class. Trade Secrets Like USB Class.

TX - A state district judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought by Houston-based Schlumberger Ltd. against a former employee who had left the company for a vice president job at a rival oilfield services company, Baker Hughes Inc.

Schlumberger had accused former employee Humair Shaikh of allegedly stealing trade secrets, but the two parties have reached a settlement...

The initial lawsuit alleged that Shaikh had violated confidentiality and noncompete agreements by taking trade secrets on four different USB drives when he left. (more) 

Business espionage goes undiscovered, ignored, swept under the carpet, and settled out of court all the time. 

Espionage is difficult to stop without a real commitment to protection. 

The common thread is that the stolen digital data often travels via USB memory sticks, and this is preventable. We can show you how.

Dyre Malware Branches out from Banking, adds Corporate Espionage

A variant of the infamous banking trojan Zeus has gone beyond targeting financial accounts, instead striving to collect another type of sensitive business data: customer information.

The variant, known as Dyre, is a banking trojan that first came to light in June when security companies warned that the Zeus knockoff found a way to bypass Web encryption, known as secure sockets layer (SSL). At the time, it targeted some of the largest global banks, such as Bank of America, Citibank, Natwest, RBS, and Ulsterbank. A recent version of Dyre, however, has begun targeting Salesforce, a popular cloud service for storing customer information, according to analyses.

Other cloud services could just as easily be targeted, according to security firm Adallom. (more)

15 Million Devices Infected With Mobile Malware

Sixty percent of the infected devices run Android. 

Fifteen million mobile devices are infected with malware, and most of those run Android, according to a new report by Alcatel-Lucent's Kindsight Security Labs.

Researchers found that "increasingly applications are spying on device owners, stealing their personal information and pirating their data minutes, causing bill shock." Mobile spyware, in particular, is on the rise. Four of the 10 top threats are spyware, including SMSTracker, which allows the attacker to remotely track and monitor all calls, SMS/MMS messages, GPS locations, and browser histories of an Android device...

About sixty percent of the infected devices are Android smartphones. About 40 percent are Windows PCs connecting through mobile networks. Windows Mobile, iPhones, Blackberrys, and Symbian devices combine for less than 1 percent. (more)

Graphene-Based, Ultra-Thin Light Detector - T-Ray Vision

A new prototype light detector uses graphene's light-absorbing properties to see in a broad band of light wavelengths that includes terahertz waves. These fall between the microwave and infrared bands, thereby making it possible to look just beneath the surface of opaque objects such as skin and plastic... 

So where might such a detector be used? In security scanners, for example, it could identify concealed weapons without invading bodily privacy. It could also make medical imaging safer and more effective.

Other applications include chemical sensing, remote bomb detection, night vision goggles/cameras, high-altitude telecommunications, manufacturing quality control (as terahertz waves penetrate cardboard and plastic), preventing premature car rusting, and even 3D printing.

A paper describing the research was published recently in the journal Nature. (more) (Get the T-shirt)

I see TSCM applications, too. ~Kevin

14 Security Tips for Mobile Phone Users

As smartphone usage grows in the business, many users still don’t understand proper security practices. If not addressed, this problem could put their (and your company’s) sensitive data at risk. Learn how your users can better protect themselves from mobile security threats. (7 Tips) (7 more Tips, including one from us!)