Scotland - The former boss of Edinburgh Trams quit his job in anger over the “outrageous” spying carried out against his colleagues by rival transport firm Lothian Buses.
According to his leaked resignation letter, Tom Norris left his £80,000 a year post last year over the bus company’s covert monitoring of staff.
He also wrote it was “extraordinary” the individual behind the snooping had not been fired and hit out at the “gross mishandling” of the scandal.
Edinburgh Trams and Lothian Buses are separate companies, but they share IT, media relations and human resources and are ultimately owned by the city council. more
South Korea - A senior official at Samsung Electronics Co. was arrested for trying to steal a core chip-making technology...
The international crime investigation unit at Gyeonggi Police Agency on Thursday arrested an unnamed executive vice president at Samsung Electronics of the semiconductor division on suspicion of committing industrial espionage.
A security guard at the company reportedly found confidential documents in his car during a routine security check.
The company immediately searched his house and called the police upon discovering thousands of classified documents he kept at his house. more
The Indian police on Saturday detained another pigeon that flew into a village near the heavily militarised border with Pakistan on a suspicion of 'spy'.
The state intelligence and army officers were inspecting the pigeon that might have flown across border from Pakistan and landed in Punjab's Hoshiarpur district with some words in Urdu inscribed on its wings.
The bird was handed over to police by a local Naresh Kumar who spotted some 'suspicious text' on the wings which were actually names of the week days. The pigeon was X-rayed to verify if something was hidden inside but no clues were discovered having any links with Pakistan.
It is pertinent to mention here that in 2015, Indian authorities had captured a pigeon which was claimed to be a 'spy' pigeon from Pakistan. In 2013, Indian security forces found a dead falcon fitted with a small camera, and in 2010 another pigeon was detained over espionage fears.more
WA - Ferino’s Pizzeria owner Adam Burns says he may not reactivate the interactive part of his Facebook page ever again after it was hacked and photos of female employees using a restroom were posted online.
Burns said he first thought that someone was prank-calling the Port Hadlock business, but then he looked on the business’s Facebook account and “it was blowing up with disgusting comments.”
The videos showed females, in various levels of undress, using the restroom...
Brett Anglin, Jefferson County Sheriff's Office detective, confirmed that the sheriff's office received a call from Adams about a video recording device having apparently been used inside an employee restroom...
Deputies came and checked the restaurant for hidden cameras. Burns did not reopen the restaurant that day.
“They found nothing,” he said. “Whatever was in here is gone now. Never in a million years did I feel like this would happen here. It's like it's not real,” he said. more
WA - Redmond Police arrested a 25-year-old lifeguard for allegedly taping a cell phone to a wall in the female locker room of Redmond’s Hartman Pool.
Redmond Police said the man was suspended from his job and prohibited from returning to the property as detectives continue their investigation. A female coach discovered the phone and immediately called 911. more
IN - The man accused of recording topless women in his Granger Tiki Tan tanning salon pleaded guilty to four felony charges; three counts of voyeurism and one count of obstruction of justice. Albert Reasonover was arrested in April when an alleged victim discovered she was being filmed during a spray tan. more
If you ever wanted to chat to a spy, now's your chance – a group of German artists have set up the "Call a Spy" hotline.
Ariel Fischer from the art group "Peng!" told Sputnik Deutschland that they can set up the hotline anywhere with a stable internet connection. It looks like an ordinary telephone, but is connected to the "Call a Spy" server.
The server contains a database of spy's numbers, and randomly selects one to connect the caller with. Calls are routed through a private network that masks the original source of the call.
Fischer said that despite the secrecy of intelligence work, the majority of the numbers were freely available on the internet, and come from a range of different countries. more
Police in the Australian State of Victoria have warned citizens not to trust un-marked USB sticks that appear in their letterboxes.
The warning, issued today, says “The USB drives are believed to be extremely harmful and members of the public are urged to avoid plugging them into their computers or other devices.”...
In a first, scientists have successfully teleported a photon – particle of light – over a distance of six kilometres, an advance that may enable secure communication without having to worry about eavesdropping.
Researchers at the University of Calgary in Canada, led by professor Wolfgang Tittel, set a new record for distance of transferring a quantum state by teleportation, using fibre optics cable infrastructure.
“Such a network will enable secure communication without having to worry about eavesdropping, and allow distant quantum computers to connect,” said Tittel.
The experiment is based on the entanglement property of quantum mechanics, also known as “spooky action at a distance” – a property so mysterious that not even German physicist Albert Einstein could come to terms with it. more
CA - A former Scientologist confronted a City Council candidate at a California meeting, where she revealed they both had been sent as spies by the group to harass one of the church’s critics.
Paulien Lombard, who has since left the church, addressed a City Council meeting in Garden Grove, describing how she and candidate Clay Bock had been sent by Scientology’s spy wing, the Office of Special Affairs, to intimidate a man who’d been protesting outside the group’s “Int Base,”... Bock was actually in attendance when Lombard outed him as a Scientology spy, and the stunned City Council candidate nervously addressed the meeting afterward.
“I had no idea Paulien would be here or that this would be an issue,” Bock said. more
FL - Deputies with the Lake County Sheriff's Office seized various equipment after Robert Anthony O'Hare's arrest last year. Through the seizure, they learned O'Hare had placed hidden cameras in two miniature jukeboxes that were later delivered to children.
"They didn't go through the post office, it looks as they he hand-delivered them," said John Herrell, with the Lake County Sheriff's Office.
The hidden cameras were used to film the children unbeknownst to them, according to deputies.
"As long as they (the jukeboxes) were plugged into the wall, those cameras were activated," Herrell said. "He could use a remote control and remotely control what the camera was viewing."
O'Hare is accused of producing hundreds of videos using a telescopic lens and camera found in his closet during a search of his home in October 2015, deputies said.
Hundreds of downloaded pornographic videos involving adults were also found on his devices, according to authorities. O’Hare is also accused of downloading child porn at a coffee shop. more
US - Effective December 1, 2016, Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure will be amended to expand the reach of the authority of federal judges when they are issuing search warrants. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon contends that the upcoming changes present a major threat to civil liberties associated with content stored on or accessible through electronic devices.
As modified, Rule 41 will permit federal judges to authorize expanded remote searches of electronic devices including computers and smartphones. Senator Wyden contends that the revised rule will enable federal judges to issue search warrants to permit remote searches of virtually any device, and the material accessible through that device, no matter where the device is located.
Wyden claims that this broad authority would enable a single federal judge to facilitate remote searches of millions of devices and all the materials accessible through those devices. He has proposed legislation which would block this rule modification. His legislative proposal has, however, not yet been enacted, thus the proposed rule changes currently remain on track for the December 1 effective date. more
United Kingdom-based NRI (A Non-Resident Indian is a citizen of India who holds an Indian passport and has temporarily emigrated to another country for six months or more...)who claims ‘spying chips’ were installed in his body would be examined at Jalandhar’s Army hospital after the Ministry of Home Affairs forwarded his plea requesting their removal to the Punjab government.
Harinder Pal Singh, who returned from the UK three years ago, claimed British police had installed chips in his body for spying...
Narrating his bizarre-sounding story... “I went to UK in 1987 at the age of 15 with my grandmom. One day, I was sleeping in my room and some plainclothes policemen made me unconscious and got instruments installed in my body.”
“In 1996, my nearly four-year-old daughter died in an accident, which was changed into murder. I was convicted for it and sentenced to 15 years. After completing my jail term on February 13, 2013, I was deported,’’ he claimed. more
US - In a major victory for journalists and privacy and transparency advocates, a federal court has started the process of unsealing secret records related to the government's use of electronic surveillance.
US District Court Judge Beryl Howell said at a hearing Friday morning that absent an objection by government attorneys (the maybe), the court would post to its website next week a list of all case numbers from 2012 in which federal prosecutors in Washington, DC applied for an order to install a pen register or a trap and trace device.
A pen register is an electronic apparatus that tracks phone numbers called from a specific telephone line (though the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act expanded the definition of pen register to allow for collection of email headers as well). A trap and trace device is similar, but tracks the phone numbers of incoming calls. For decades, court records relating to these documents have typically been sealed in their entirety, including even the docket numbers. more
For just a few bucks, you can pick up a USB stick that destroys almost anything that it's plugged into. Laptops, PCs, televisions, photo booths -- you name it.
Once a proof-of-concept, the pocket-sized USB stick now fits in any security tester's repertoire of tools and hacks, says the Hong Kong-based company that developed it.
It works like this: when the USB Kill stick is plugged in, it rapidly charges its capacitors from the USB power supply, and then discharges -- all in the matter of seconds.
On unprotected equipment, the device's makers say it will "instantly and permanently disable unprotected hardware"...
The lesson here is simple enough. If a device has an exposed USB port -- such as a copy machine or even an airline entertainment system -- it can be used and abused, not just by a hacker or malicious actor, but also electrical attacks.
"Any public facing USB port should be considered an attack vector," says the company. "In data security, these ports are often locked down to prevent exfiltration of data, or infiltration of malware, but are very often unprotected against electrical attack."
Not every device is vulnerable to a USB Kill attack. The device maker said that Apple "voluntarily" protected its hardware. more
From USBKill.com... USBKill.com strongly condems malicious use of its products.
The USB Killer is developed and sold as a testing device. Use of the device can permanently damage hardware. Customers agree to the terms and conditions of sale, and acknowledge the consequences of use.
In a nutshell, users are responsible for their acts.
A hammer used maliciously can permanently damage to a third party's device. The USB Killer, used maliciously, can permanently damage a third party's device.
As with any tool, it is the individual, not the manufacturer of the tool, responsible for how the individual uses the tool.
The USB Killer was used on our equipment
Please see above. We suggest pursuing the individual responsible, or reporting the act to the appropriate authorities.
This is only one spy trick. We know hundreds more. Call us for a TSCM / Information Security Survey.
Random number generators are crucial to the encryption that protects our privacy and security... For the first time, engineers have developed a fast random number generator based on a quantum mechanical process that could deliver the world’s most secure encryption keys in a package tiny enough to use in a mobile device.
In The Optical Society's journal for high impact research, Optica, the researchers report on their fully integrated device for random number generation. The new work represents a key advancement... delivering the highest quality numbers and thus the highest level of security — into computers, tablets and mobile phones.
“We’ve managed to put quantum-based technology that has been used in high profile science experiments into a package that might allow it to be used commercially,” said the paper’s first author, Carlos Abellan, a doctoral student at ICFO-The Institute of Photonic Sciences, a member of the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology, Spain. “This is likely just one example of quantum technologies that will soon be available for use in real commercial products. It is a big step forward as far as integration is concerned.” more
According to his leaked resignation letter, Tom Norris left his £80,000 a year post last year over the bus company’s covert monitoring of staff.
The state intelligence and army officers were inspecting the pigeon that might have flown across border from Pakistan and landed in Punjab's Hoshiarpur district with some words in Urdu inscribed on its wings.
Burns said he first thought that someone was prank-calling the Port Hadlock business, but then he looked on the business’s Facebook account and “it was blowing up with disgusting comments.”
Researchers at the University of Calgary in Canada, led by professor Wolfgang Tittel, set a new record for distance of transferring a quantum state by teleportation, using fibre optics cable infrastructure.
"They didn't go through the post office, it looks as they he hand-delivered them," said John Herrell, with the Lake County Sheriff's Office. 
As modified, Rule 41 will permit federal judges to authorize expanded remote searches of electronic devices including computers and smartphones. Senator Wyden contends that the revised rule will enable federal judges to issue search warrants to permit remote searches of virtually any device, and the material accessible through that device, no matter where the device is located.
Harinder Pal Singh, who returned from the UK three years ago, claimed British police had installed chips in his body for spying...
US District Court Judge Beryl Howell said at a hearing Friday morning that absent an objection by government attorneys (the maybe), the court would post to its website next week a list of all case numbers from 2012 in which federal prosecutors in Washington, DC applied for an order to install a pen register or a trap and trace device.
Once a proof-of-concept, the pocket-sized USB stick now fits in any security tester's repertoire of tools and hacks, says the Hong Kong-based company that developed it.
For the first time, engineers have developed a fast random number generator based on a quantum mechanical process that could deliver the world’s most secure encryption keys in a package tiny enough to use in a mobile device.