Spycam News: Gawker Smacks Down on Monday

Gawker, the best known part of Gawker Media, but apparently the least salvageable, will not be welcomed aboard the lifeboat that Univision has sent to the sinking company in the form of a $135 million bid for its assets. The site will cease publishing on Monday, according to a person familiar with the situation...

Gawker's nearly 14 years' worth of media-world scoops, amusing rants, gratuitous take-downs and occasional investigative gems will be archived, according to a memo company founder and Chief Executive Nick Denton sent to staffers Thursday announcing the site's closure.

"We have not been able to find a single media company or investor willing to take on Gawker.com," he wrote. "The campaign being mounted against its editorial ethos and former writers has made it too risky. I can understand the caution. Gawker.com may, like Spy Magazine in its day, have a second act. For the moment, however, it will be mothballed, until the smoke clears and a new owner can be found."...

Gawker Media, which declared bankruptcy in June after losing an invasion-of-privacy suit brought by Hulk Hogan. A Florida jury awarded him $140 million in the case, which revolved around a sex tape of the wrestler, whose real name is Terry Bollea, that Gawker published.  more

Early 20th Century Phone Privacy Gadgets

Invented in 1921, the Hush-A-Phone was advertised as a “telephone silencer” and a device that “Makes your phone private as a booth.”

It produced the same effect as cupping both your hands around the mouthpiece of the two-pieced candlestick model telephone, with others in the room only hearing a rumbling of indiscernible sounds.

Callers only needed to slide the Hush-A-Phone over the mouthpiece of the phone, place their lips in the circular opening, and speak. The device was simple, easy to use, and it worked.

Yet, the Hush-A-Phone isn’t remembered for its simplicity, or success in creating an artificial cone of silence. Rather, the device is known for waging a war against the telecommunication giant, AT&T—a historic legal battle law experts compare to feuds over today’s open internet. more

Predating the Hush-A-Phone by about 20 years was The Whispering Mouthpiece. ~Kevin

Court: Producers of Spyware Can Be Held Liable

A federal appeals court says the maker of an online spying tool can be sued on accusations of wiretapping. The federal lawsuit was brought by a man whose e-mail and instant messages to a woman were captured by the husband of the woman. That husband used that data as a "battering ram" as part of his 2010 divorce proceedings.

It's the second time in a week that a federal court has ruled in a wiretapping case—in favor of a person whose online communications were intercepted without consent. The other ruling was against Google. A judge ruled that a person not using Gmail who sent e-mail to another person using Gmail had not consented to Gmail's automatic scanning of the e-mail for marketing purposes. Hence, Google could be sued (PDF) for alleged wiretapping violations.

For the moment, the two outcomes are a major victory for privacy. But the reasoning in the lawsuit against the makers of the WebWatcher spy program could have ramifications far beyond the privacy context—and it places liability on the producers of spyware tools. more

"DiskFiltration" - Siphons Data Even When Computers are Disconnected from the Internet.

Researchers have devised a new way to siphon data out of an infected computer even when it has been physically disconnected from the Internet to prevent the leakage of sensitive information it stores. 

The method has been dubbed "DiskFiltration" by its creators because it uses acoustic signals emitted from the hard drive of the air-gapped computer being targeted. It works by manipulating the movements of the hard drive's actuator, which is the mechanical arm that accesses specific parts of a disk platter so heads attached to the actuator can read or write data.

By using so-called seek operations that move the actuator in very specific ways, it can generate sounds that transfer passwords, cryptographic keys, and other sensitive data stored on the computer to a nearby microphone. The technique has a range of six feet and a speed of 180 bits per minute, fast enough to steal a 4,096-bit key in about 25 minutes. more

Solution: Upgrade to a solid state drive.

Mom Alerted - Daughters' Bedroom Nanny Cam Streaming on Internet

A mother from Texas was horrified to learn that the cameras she used to keep watch on her 8-year-old girls had been hacked and were being live streamed on the internet.

She made the appalling discovery after she found a screenshot posted by another woman on a Facebook group for Houston Mothers, who was trying to alert mothers after stumbling across a free app ‘Live Camera Viewer.’ ...

According to security experts, her private cameras had been hacked by accessing the household’s IP address through her daughter’s iPad whilst she was playing a video game, and was consequently live streamed to an online feed.

The feed, which is sorted according to the number of ‘likes’ that users give, had been available since July, and had 571 ‘likes,’ meaning at least that many people had been watching it over the course of the stream.  more

IT Guy Pleads Not Guilty to Eavesdropping Charge — Recordings Found

IL - The technology director of Abingdon-Avon schools pleaded not guilty to charges of eavesdropping Tuesday at a hearing.

Mark L. Rogers, 56, of Abingdon, is on paid administrative leave from Abingdon-Avon School District 276 and has been charged with three felony counts of eavesdropping. Abingdon Police Chief Kenneth Jones testified...

Jones said authorities found that Rogers had installed a webcam in his office that was not part of the school system. Authorities found a "number of videos collected from February 2016," including one of a meeting between Rogers and Drew Witherall, who was assistant technology director at the time. Witherall said he was unaware of the Feb. 11 recording.  more

Car Key Fobs — Wireless = Useless

...a team of researchers from the University of Birmingham and the German engineering firm Kasper & Oswald plan to reveal two distinct vulnerabilities they say affect the keyless entry systems of an estimated nearly 100 million cars. 

One of the attacks would allow resourceful thieves to wirelessly unlock practically every vehicle the Volkswagen group has sold for the last two decades, including makes like Audi and Škoda. The second attack affects millions more vehicles, including Alfa Romeo, Citroen, Fiat, Ford, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Opel, and Peugeot.

Both attacks use a cheap, easily available piece of radio hardware to intercept signals from a victim’s key fob, then employ those signals to clone the key. The attacks, the researchers say, can be performed with a software defined radio connected to a laptop, or in a cheaper and stealthier package, an Arduino board with an attached radio receiver that can be purchased for $40. “The cost of the hardware is small, and the design is trivial,” says Garcia. “You can really build something that functions exactly like the original remote.”

...they were able to extract a single cryptographic key value shared among millions of Volkswagen vehicles. By then using their radio hardware to intercept another value that’s unique to the target vehicle and included in the signal sent every time a driver presses the key fob’s buttons, they can combine the two supposedly secret numbers to clone the key fob and access to the car. “You only need to eavesdrop once,” says Birmingham researcher David Oswald. “From that point on you can make a clone of the original remote control that locks and unlocks a vehicle as many times as you want.” more
original paper

Quote of the Week

"We have never had absolute privacy in this country." ~FBI Director James Comey more

Pokemon Go — The Story Behind the Story

The suddenly vast scale of Pokemon Go adoption is matched by the game’s aggressive use of personal information. Unlike, say, Twitter, Facebook, or Netflix, the app requires uninterrupted use of your location and camera — a “trove of sensitive user data,” as one privacy watchdog put it in a concerned letter to federal regulators.

All the more alarming, then, that Pokemon Go is run by a man whose team literally drove one of the greatest privacy debacles of the internet era, in which Google vehicles, in the course of photographing neighborhoods for the Street View feature of the company’s online maps, secretly copied digital traffic from home networks, scooping up passwords, email messages, medical records, financial information, and audio and video files.

Before Niantic Labs CEO John Hanke was the man behind an unfathomably popular smartphone goldmine, he ran Google’s Geo division, responsible for nearly everything locational at a time when the search company was turning into much more, expanding away from cataloging the web and towards cataloging every city block on the planet.

Hanke landed at Google after his wildly popular (and admittedly very neat) CIA-funded company Keyhole, which collected geographic imagery, was acquired in 2004 and relaunched as Google Earth in 2005. more

What Has More Privacy Than the Invisible iPhone Screen?

The NoPhone, of course.
 

Click to enlarge.

more

Inventor Builds Invisible iPhone Screen for Covert Viewing

A Kurdish inventor builds a secret screen for the iPhone that enables only the user to see the contents by wearing special glasses.

It's a problem many of us have faced - how to stop prying eyes peeking at what's on our phone screen But an inventor in Turkey claims to have solved it Celal Goger has invented a secrecy screen that turns iPhones invisible. Only the wearer of these glasses can see the screen. The magic is in a chip that enables the glasses to communicate with the phone...

"The mobile's screen is completely white, nothing can be seen, you can't see the menu. He gave me the glasses and, when I put them on, I saw the complete menu. If I had this on my mobile, nobody would see what I'm looking at or which apps I'm using when I'm commuting."

His next plan is to invent a nanochip that can fit any glasses and turn the screen visible or invisible with a single button. more

Tapes Could Compel Major Fox News Settlement

A settlement with former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson
over alleged sexual harassment by Roger Ailes, the network's former chairman, is expected to reach eight figures. The reason: There are audio tapes of conversations between several female employees and Ailes, who resigned last month. A settlement would most likely keep the tapes private. more

Android Bug May Affect 900 Million Smartphones

The bugs were uncovered by Checkpoint researchers looking at software running on chipsets made by US firm Qualcomm.

Qualcomm processors are found in about 900 million Android phones, the company said...

• Affected devices included:
• BlackBerry Priv
• Blackphone 1 and Blackphone 2
• Google Nexus 5X, Nexus 6 and Nexus 6P
• HTC One, HTC M9 and HTC 10
• LG G4, LG G5, and LG V10
• New Moto X by Motorola
• OnePlus One, OnePlus 2 and OnePlus 3
• US versions of the Samsung Galaxy S7 and Samsung S7 Edge
• Sony Xperia Z Ultra

Exploiting the bugs would allow an attacker to gradually be able to take more control over a device and gain access to its data.

In response, Qualcomm is believed to have created patches for the bugs and started to use the fixed versions in its factories. It has also distributed the patches to phone makers and operators. However, it is not clear how many of those companies have issued updates to customers' phones.

Checkpoint has created a free app called QuadRooter Scanner that can be used to check if a phone is vulnerable to any of the bugs, by looking to see if the patches for them have been downloaded and installed.  more

Here's What Eavesdropper See When You Use Unsecured Wi-Fi Hotspots

You’ve probably read at least one story with warnings about using unsecure public Wi-Fi hotspots, so you know that eavesdroppers can capture information traveling over those networks. But nothing gets the point across as effectively as seeing the snooping in action. So I parked myself at my local coffee shop the other day to soak up the airwaves and see what I could see.

My intent wasn't to hack anyone's computer or device—that's illegal—but just to listen. It’s similar to listening in on someone’s CB or walkie-talkie radio conversation. Like CBs and walkie-talkies, Wi-Fi networks operate on public airwaves that anyone nearby can tune into.

As you'll see, it’s relatively easy to capture sensitive communication at the vast majority of public hotspots—locations like cafes, restaurants, airports, hotels, and other public places. You can snag emails, passwords, and unencrypted instant messages, and you can hijack unsecured logins to popular websites. Fortunately, ways exist to protect your online activity while you’re out-and-about with your laptop, tablet, and other Wi-Fi gadgets. I'll touch on those, too. more

PS - The author, Eric Geier, also provides a very good "How to use Wi-Fi hotspots securely" checklist. ~Kevin

Mayor Charged: Strip Poker, Alcohol, Eavesdropping... with minors

CA - Stockton Mayor Anthony Silva was arrested Thursday at his youth camp on charges that he played strip poker with a minor and provided youngsters with alcohol, according to authorities...

http://documents.latimes.com/complaint-against-stockton-mayor-anthony-silva/

The 42-year-old mayor stands accused of one felony count of making an illegal recording and one misdemeanor count each of providing alcohol to a minor, cruelty to a child by endangering their health and contributing to the delinquency of a minor...

Amador County District Attorney Todd Riebe said the strip poker game occurred in Silva’s bedroom at the camp.

According to prosecutors, one of the participants was a 16-year-old boy. Prosecutors alleged that the audio was recorded secretly and that a “surreptitious recording clearly indicates that the participants did not want to be recorded.”

Witnesses also informed FBI agents that Silva provided alcohol to the poker game participants, all of whom were underage. Witnesses stated also that Silva had supplied alcohol and made it available to a number of underage counselors at the camp, according to officials.

Included in the evidence were details of a prior episode in which Silva audiotaped a conversation with a Stockton city employee without their consent, officials said. Prosecutors said that another witness told investigators that Silva had cameras installed in his bedroom and at the Stockton Kid's Club. more