Eavesdrop on Elevators

Did you know that some elevators talk to their bosses?

Yes, machines do have a secret life.
Eavesdrop on one.
Fascinating!

Workplace Eavesdropping - Time to Consider a Recording in the Workplace Policy

PA - A Fayetteville man is accused of secretly recording a conversation regarding a workplace dispute and posting the recording on Facebook.

John Frederick Richards III, 54, is charged with felony intercepting communications and "disclose intercepted communications," according to court documents. more

A Spycam Detection Program & Recording in the Workplace Policy is available here.

P.S. If you are going to break eavesdropping laws,  don't post the evidence on Facebook. ~Kevin

FutureWatch: Powerless Bugs or Teslabestiola II (update)

Back in 2013, the Security Scrapbook alerted you to Ambient Backscatter as a developing technology with extreme potential, including electronic surveillance / eavesdropping. 

At that time I said, "Ambient Backscatter research is in its infancy. Imagine the possibilities. Technical espionage could see its biggest advancement since the transistor."

Today, Jeeva Wireless, is developing this technology and is about to come out of stealth mode. 

The technology is so interesting, NASA has posted Federal contract opportunity NND1710133Q, "a sole source contract under the authority FAR 13.106-1(b)(1)(i)."

Here is the update...

"A group of University of Washington engineers has raised capital to develop and commercialize a power-efficient way to generate WiFi transmissions.


Jeeva Wireless just reeled in a $1.2 million round, co-founder Shyamnath Gollakota confirmed with GeekWire. He declined to provide more details about the cash and how Jeeva will use it, as the Seattle startup is still in stealth mode.

The company’s co-founders are the same UW researchers who co-authored a study last year for a Passive Wi-Fi system that can generate WiFi transmissions using 10,000 times less power than conventional methods.

Not even low-power options such as Bluetooth Low Energy and Zigbee can match the system’s energy efficiency, based on the study that earned the UW team a place on MIT Technology Review’s top-ten list of breakthrough technologies in 2016. With the fresh funding, it appears that the company is ready to commercialize its innovation" more

This Month's SpyCam Darwin Award - Shot While Spycaming

NY - An Erie County man has been arrested after spying on his neighbors with his cell phone.

Investigators said David Schindley's phone had more than 50 videos held closely to the windows of bedrooms, bathrooms or other rooms. The videos go back to this past October.

Schindley was taken into custody on Sunday after he was shot by a homeowner on the 500 block of Bald Eagle Drive. Deputies said the homeowner heard a noise and thought Schindley was trying to break into his home.

Schindley was shot in the leg, the homeowner who shot the suspect was not charged. more

Television-Spying Case - Vizio to Pay $2.2 Million

The Federal Trade Commission said Monday that Vizio used 11 million televisions to spy on its customers.

The company agreed to pay $2.2 million to settle a case with the FTC and the New Jersey attorney general’s office after the agencies accused it of secretly collecting — and selling — data about its customers’ locations, demographics and viewing habits.

“Before a company pulls up a chair next to you and starts taking careful notes on everything you watch (and then shares it with its partners), it should ask if that’s O.K. with you,” Kevin McCarthy, an attorney with the FTC’s Division of Privacy and Identity Protection, wrote in a blog post. “Vizio wasn’t doing that, and the FTC stepped in.”

As part of the settlement, Vizio neither confirmed nor denied wrongdoing. more

All Black's Bugging Scandal - Update

Australia - The security guard accused of fabricating the All Blacks hotel bugging scandal that rocked last year’s Bledisloe Cup has vehemently denied any wrongdoing saying: “I don’t know anything about this ­stupid bloody bug.”

Gravel-voiced Adrian Gard, 51... was charged with public mischief after a listening device was unearthed in the All Blacks’ team meeting room at the InterContinental in Double Bay...

Gard, who has 31 years’ experience in the security industry, is at the centre of a bizarre cloak and dagger scandal after a device similar to that used by law enforcement and spying agencies was discovered in a routine sweep of the team’s meeting room in August ahead of the clash with Australia. It was reportedly found in the foam of a chair...

Police will allege the security chief, who has protected the All Blacks for more than 10 years, claimed he “found” the device but investigators do not believe it was stuffed in a chair.

Gard, from Brisbane, will face court next month for the offence which relates to providing police with false information carrying a maximum 12-month sentence. more

Sad Story of the Beaten Bean Counter, or Wiretap Whistleblower Wasted

The Ninth Circuit on Monday dealt a final blow to a career prosecutor whose whistleblower lawsuit claimed the nation’s largest telecommunications bilked the federal government for surveillance services for two decades. 

The Ninth Circuit panel affirmed dismissal of prosecutor John Christopher Prather’s whistleblower suit...

He said the reduced labor should have lowered costs, but that the telecoms began charging law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and the Justice Department, fees 10 times higher than they should have been.

Prather, who reviewed the telecoms’ rate sheets and developed surveillance budgets as part of his duties supervising wiretapping activities, grew suspicious, and filed a qui tam action in 2009 under the False Claims Act. more previously in the Security Scrapbook

All Blacks Bugging: Man Charged

A man, understood to be a security consultant for New Zealand's All Blacks rugby team, has been charged over a listening device found in the team's Sydney hotel room during last year's Bledisloe Cup.

The device — described as similar to that used by law enforcement and spy agencies — was found inside a chair during a routine security search of the team's meeting room at the Intercontinental Hotel at Double Bay ahead of a Bledisloe Cup match against Australia last year.

Adrian Gard, 51, is understood to be a consultant for BGI Security which was contracted by the All Blacks during their Bledisloe Cup campaign.

He has been charged with public mischief over the bugging incident. more

Car Wars: Fifty Years of Backstabbing Infighting And Industrial Espionage (book)

Car Wars - An "astonishing...eye-opening chronicle" (Publisher's Weekly) of backstabbing, infighting, and industrial theft and espionage in the world's biggest business. It makes empires; it destroys economies; it shapes history.

Welcome to the world's biggest business--the automobile industry. A hundred years ago there were six highly experimental cars. Today there are close to 400 million cars on the planet: set bumper to bumper on a six-lane highway, they would stretch well over 200,000 miles, more than eight times around the earth.

With hundreds of billions of dollars at stake, is it any wonder that the major car companies wage a relentless war against one another, where (almost) anything goes? Here is the story of all the schemes and deceits, treacheries and shady deals in the battle for the world's car markets since the dawn of the global economy fifty years ago. more

The James Bond Movie Director Who Actually Was A Spy

That James Bond creator Ian Fleming drew literary inspiration from his wartime work in espionage is relatively well known. But the heroic World War Two exploits of the director of Bond films including Goldfinger and Live and Let Die are less well documented. more

Guy Hamilton's daring exploits can be relived on Inside Out South West on BBC One on Monday 6 February at 19:30 BST and on the iPlayer for 30 days thereafter

Security Director Alert - Check the Security of Your Networked Printers

Following recent research that showed many printer models are vulnerable to attacks, a hacker decided to prove the point and forced thousands of publicly exposed printers to spew out rogue messages.

Stackoverflowin claims to be a high-school student from the U.K. who is interested in security research...

The issue of publicly exposed printers is not new and has been exploited before to print rogue and sometimes offensive messages. However, the issue was renewed last week when researchers from Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany published a paper on different attacks against network printers and an assessment of 20 printer models. The researchers also released a Printer Exploitation Toolkit and published a printer hacking wiki.

Users should make sure that their printers can't be accessed through a public Internet Protocol address at all, Stackoverflowin said. However, if they need to do this, they should enforce access rules in their routers and only whitelist certain IP addresses, or set up a virtual private network, he said. more

I occasionally find networked printers are a back door to company networks. The most common issue is unsecured WiFi access. Have your IT department review this post and then double-check the security of the printers. Or, contact me for a complete technical information security inspection (TSCM). ~Kevin

Weird TSCM Science - Tuning Windows to Block Radio Frequency Eavesdropping

A new flexible material developed by engineers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) is claimed to be able to tune out various portions of the electromagnetic spectrum while allowing others to pass through, such as being opaque to infra-red but transparent to visible light, for example. This material has the potential to vastly improve the efficiencies of solar cells, or create window coatings that not only let in visible light and keep out heat, but also stop electronic eavesdropping by blocking electromagnetic signals.

Though still very much at the working prototype stage, the researchers intend to further their research by analyzing the effects of different materials, physical arrangements, and semiconductor properties in an attempt to create materials that absorb light at different wavelengths for use in a variety of applications.

The results of this research were recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. more

How to be a Spy

Are you cut out for 00 status?

Rule #1 - Don't look goofy.

In America, spies in trench coats are usually bugging your office and listening in on your phone calls. In Britain, her majesty’s secret servants are busy code breaking between rounds of cricket.

In Vienna, instead, you just spend a day at the coffee house and, if you listen carefully, you will soon be up-to-date about the latest rumors of this city that loves secrets – and even more, to gossip about them on the sly...

Luckily, the city offers everything you need to live the high life of a spy. more

Even Your Car is Spying on You

You may not know this, but your car is collecting lots of information about your driving habits and history.
Who has access to this data and for what purpose? We speak with Lauren Smith, policy counsel at The Future of Privacy Forum. audio download

Recent Spy Camera News

A radiologist at a private practice has been spared jail after stashing his mobile phone in an air vent to record patients using the unisex toilet. more

An Orleans Parish judge dealt several setbacks late Tuesday to a prominent New Orleans breast reconstruction surgeon who faces rape and video voyeurism charges. Dr. Alireza Sadeghi, 41, is accused of raping and surreptitiously filming his now-estranged wife and of videotaping four nude patients in the operating room without their consent. In at least one instance, prosecutors claim, Sadeghi forwarded the footage to a friend. His trial is scheduled for March 20. more

A Utah man and student at BYU-Idaho has been accused of placing a small camera in the bathroom of a Rexburg apartment where six female students live... Rexburg police say a small camera was found hidden inside a towel hook mounted in the bathroom. more

A handyman who was jailed for 24 weeks after he hid a spy camera in a woman's bathroom after being invited round to fix her banisters is appealing his conviction... The court had heard Burnett, 41, planted the covert device in a vase in the victim's bathroom and could control it using an app on his mobile phone. When the victim went to change the flowers in the bathroom two months later she discovered the device and contacted the police. more

Some Indiana lawmakers suggest drone users with nefarious intentions could be flying under the radar under existing laws. ...the proposal creates a “remote aerial voyeurism” crime and addresses penalties for sex offenders operating drones inappropriately. more

Shaun Turner accessed his victims’ personal webcams but was caught by the Eastern Regional Operations Unit (ERSOU) following a tip-off. Turner, 29, of Race Course View, Cottenham, was used a malware system known as a Remote Access Trojan or ‘RAT’, a court heard. The RATs used by Turner enabled him to download all files held on his victims’ computers – including personal pictures, videos and identity documents. In addition, he deployed software to victims’ computers that streamed live images taken by their webcam to his own computer to view. more