Rarely has a spy case attracted as much attention in Germany as that of Daniel M. The bungling double agent passed on troves of bank data to German tax officials while allegedly gathering info on them for the Swiss.
A German court has handed a suspended sentence of one year and 10 months to the former Zurich police detective for spying on the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia's (NRW) tax authority and some of its staff for nearly four years up to February 2015.
The regional court in Germany's financial capital, Frankfurt, also slapped a fine of €25,000 ($29,000) on the 54-year-old Swiss double agent. more
AL - The former director of the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency (Spencer Collier) said former Governor Robert Bentley wanted to know why his wife, Dianne shouldn't be arrested after he discovered she had been secretly recording his conversations with the aide suspected of being his mistress.
Collier said, "Once I become confident that Ms. Dianne was responsible for recording him, I told him and ended the investigation.
He wanted to know why she couldn't be arrested for planting an eavesdropping device.
I explained that in my opinion, no [District Attorney] in AL or the [Attorney General] was willing to prosecute a wife for recording her spouse caught in the act of adultery... He became upset and stated that if she or anyone disseminated the information that he would demand that they be arrested." more
A simple coding error made in hundreds of apps may have exposed as many as 180 million smartphone users to having their text messages and phone conversations intercepted by hackers, security researchers warned.
The warning comes from experts at the cybersecurity firm Appthority, who spotted an error plaguing as many as 685 mobile apps—including one used for secure communications by a federal law enforcement agency...
The issue, which has been dubbed Eavesdropper...
Eavesdropper is an especially troublesome problem for a number of
reasons. First, most users are likely unaware of what API their mobile
apps use to handle certain features like texts and calls so it is
unlikely the average person would be able to spot if an app they are
using is vulnerable. more
The state Supreme Court has suspended a northern Indiana attorney for at least four years after finding that he eavesdropped on private conversations between homicide suspects and their attorneys when he was a deputy prosecutor.
The court's disciplinary commission recommended Robert Neary be disbarred. But the justices instead issued an order Monday prohibiting him from working as a lawyer for four years...
They found that when Neary was a LaPorte County deputy prosecutor, he committed attorney misconduct by listening to two homicide suspects' confidential attorney-client conversations in incidents in 2012 and 2014 involving an audio feed and a video recording made in a police interview room. more
End-to-end encrypted messaging app Wire has introduced a version of its service for business customers...
Wire CEO Alan Duric told ZDNet that the company had 300 firms on the
Teams pilot and that businesses were using the service for their top
managers or M&A teams and issues like crisis communications.
Wire is also eyeing the Internet of Things, arguing that end-to-end encryption could be applied to messages to devices as well as chats with your colleagues.
"There is quite a bit of awareness that industrial espionage is not a myth and that they need to protect their data," he said. more
A growing number of women in Port Lincoln, South Australia, have reported being woken at night by a drone spying on them in their homes.
One woman was sleeping alone on her remote hobby farm when she was woken up by an object banging into her window, only to realize it was a drone with a camera attached.
Another woman told the ABC of the anxiety and panic she now experiences at night due to a similar encounter, saying, “You’ll hear a noise and even if it’s not a drone you just get paranoid…
Two of the victims no longer shower at night for fear of the drone capturing them while naked.
In May this year, a Sydney woman reported having been spied on by a drone while she was getting out of the shower.
These disturbing instances reflect the growing problem of the law being ill-equipped to deal with fast-developing technology, such as drones and revenge porn — with women constituting the largest proportion of victims to cyber-crimes. more
Spybusters Tip #519 - Video voyeur drones are headline grabbers. Business espionage drones go unnoticed.
If your office has a window, you have an information security vulnerability. One quick high resolution drone camera flyby and visible paperwork and whiteboard information is theirs.
Close curtains, or angle blinds downward when you leave. No curtains? Develop the "clear desk" habit. Then, contact us to make sure the place isn't bugged. ~Kevin
FL - ...It was only after all three politicians discovered mysterious GPS
trackers under their vehicles
and turned them over to the Florida
Department of Law Enforcement that a criminal investigation began...Now, nearly a year after election day, the State Attorney’s Office has
charged Victor Elbeze with illegal tracking after FDLE agents found his
fingerprints on one of trackers...
Elbeze and his boss at the time, Steve Cohen, who owns the Hallandale Beach firm General Investigative Services, denied following any politicians...Cohen, a shadowy Russian national who recently changed his name from
Stanislav Doudnik, refused to speak on camera and wouldn’t say who hired
his firm, citing client confidentiality. But he said he never ordered
Elbeze, who has left his employ, or anyone else to do anything illegal.
more
FL - For at least three days in the final week of the 2017 legislative session, a covert surveillance camera recorded the comings and goings of legislators and lobbyists living on the sixth floor of the Tennyson condominium near the Capitol.
Click to enlarge.
Weeks later, in a dark parking lot of an Italian restaurant in Tallahassee, Sen. Jack Latvala of Clearwater, a Republican candidate for governor, was also being spied upon. Grainy photos show him standing and planting a kiss on the cheek, then the mouth, of a female lobbyist on the last night of the Legislature’s special session.
These weren’t routine smartphone photos captured for fun. They were the work of private investigators whose research has fueled an escalating barrage of rumors in the last week about sexual harassment in Tallahassee and infidelity among the state’s elected legislators.
Incoming Senate Democrat Leader Jeff Clemens of Lake Worth abruptly resigned Friday after admitting to an affair with a lobbyist. Politico Florida was the first to report on Tuesday that private investigators had documented at least four separate incidents involving Latvala dining with female lobbyists and that state law enforcement officers investigated the covert camera at the Tennyson. more
(via maxim.com) We're not suggesting that you infiltrate an enemy's ranks to take down a hostile foreign power, but if you ever want to dabble in some international espionage, have we got the shoe for you.
A dressy Derby Shoe made from fine deerskin may seem less critical than a working knowledge of close quarters combat or Russian. Still, "The Secret Shoe" from Oliver Sweeney is here to satisfy all your covert spy needs... and then some.
The luxury footwear provider teamed with VeryFirstTo.com to stash inside this unsuspecting-looking shoe two hidden compartments that can each hold three gadgets at a time.
Derby Shoe has provided 12 for you to pick from: the world's smallest phone, a tiny video camera, a mini Swiss army knife, a tracking device, a money capsule, "the world's most advanced contactless payment ring" and more.
There's also room for a house key.
Click to enlarge.
Another badass feature you'll make use of if you're ever zip-tied and about to be tossed off a helicopter (there's a chance) is the laces. They're made of Kevlar, which means they can double as a friction saw that's strong enough to cut through wood and plastic. more
If your organization isn't picking up the tab for this, you'll probably be interested in the selling price. $1307.50
Former University of Iowa student Trevor Graves was arrested last week and charged...with hacking into the school's system to change grades.
...Graves allegedly attached a keylogger to several university computers in order to compromise faculty, staff and student information. In January 2017 the scheme was identified when a keylogger was discovered and reported by a staff member...
The school estimated that about 250 people had their HawkID and password stolen.
The court documents state that Graves allegedly used the information taken to escalate his privileges within the school's computer system enabling him to change grades, an ability given only instructors. more
This school was lucky. They discovered the spying device almost by accident.
Most electronic surveillance and subsequent information loss is never discovered, because... "If you don't look, you don't find."
Typical keystroke logger attached to keyboard cable.
Technical Surveillance Countermeasures (TSCM) inspections are not just about finding bugs and wiretaps. These exams also discover keyloggers, optical surveillance (spycams) and other methods of information loss.
Periodic TSCM exams are as vital to an organization's health as medical exams are to people. Think about that for a second... both can spot a cancer while it can still be cured.
Need a TSCM exam, or a local referral? Contact me. ~Kevin
UK - Heathrow Airport officials have launched an internal investigation into how a USB memory stick containing the airport's security information was allegedly found on a London street...
The USB stick, which apparently held details such as the route which the Queen takes when using the airport and maps pin-pointing CCTV cameras and a network of tunnels and escape routes, was not given to police but instead was handed to a national newspaper, the Sunday Mirror.
The Sunday Mirror reported that an unemployed man said he was on the way to the library to search the internet for jobs when he found the USB stick in the leaves... he plugged the USB stick into a library computer a few days later and was amazed at what he found... more
Take away security tips... • Encrypt information you put on a USB memory stick. Assume it will be lost or stolen. • If you find a USB stick, don't plug it in. It may contain a virus. Dropping virus laden sticks in company parking lots is a simple spy trick.
Could the mysterious “sonic attacks” allegedly waged against U.S. Embassy employees in Cuba really just be the sounds of very loud crickets and cicadas?
That’s what Cuban officials seemed to suggest Thursday in a half-hour prime-time television special titled “Alleged Sonic Attacks.”
The special broadcast was Cuban officials’ most detailed defense to date against U.S. accusations that American diplomats in Havana were subjected to mysterious sounds that left them with a variety of ailments -- including headaches, hearing problems and concussions. more Odd that it only affected American and Canadian diplomats. ~Kevin
Your vacuum cleaner can spy on you and send the video to hackers.
Sound like a science fiction horror story?
It's reality in 2017.
Researchers at CheckPoint... discovered that as a vulnerability in the LG SmartThinQ app that accompanies the firm's smart devices. As can be seen in the video below, by exploiting that weakness, the researchers were able to force an LG Hom-Bot smart vacuum cleaner to relay a video feed to them from its camera to them.
The vulnerability apparently emanated from how SmartThinQ handled authentication and authorization of users... - that is, the tickets that allow users to access the device's video feed.
What this means is that if you have a vulnerable app and use a Hom-Bot with it anyone who knows your username - which is typically your email address - could potentially access your device's video feed or other data from the device.
Furthermore, besides creating a problem for Hom-Bot, the vulnerability may affect other LG smart devices that connect to the same app.
LG has already fixed the vulnerability, so, if you have any LG smart device and use SmartThinQ, make sure to download the latest version (1.9.23). more
Collier said, "Once I become confident that Ms. Dianne was responsible for recording him, I told him and ended the investigation.
The court's disciplinary commission recommended Robert Neary be disbarred. But the justices instead issued an order Monday prohibiting him from working as a lawyer for four years...
Wire CEO Alan Duric told ZDNet that the company had 300 firms on the
Teams pilot and that businesses were using the service for their top
managers or M&A teams and issues like crisis communications.
Spybusters Tip #519 - Video voyeur drones are headline grabbers. Business espionage drones go unnoticed. 
A dressy Derby Shoe made from fine deerskin may seem less critical than a working knowledge of close quarters combat or Russian. Still, "The Secret Shoe" from Oliver Sweeney is here to satisfy all your covert spy needs... and then some.
