The Shady Middlemen Who Sell Your Location... in real time.

If you want to follow someone in realtime, you don't need to shell out to shady data-brokers like Securus (which use a marketing company that exploits a privacy law loophole to obtain phone location data).

There are a whole constellation of location data resellers who will do business with anyone, regardless of the notional privacy protections they promise the carriers they'll put in place.

Notably, these resellers do business with bail bondsmen and bounty hunters, who can, for a few dollars, locate any phone on the major carriers' networks.

The carriers were mired in scandal over the Securus affair last year, and pledged to clean up their act (T-Mobile CEO John Legere tweeted "I’ve personally evaluated this issue & have pledged that @tmobile will not sell customer location data to shady middlemen"). They have not. more

Mystery ‘Sonic Attack’ on U.S. Diplomats in Cuba Was Really Crickets

Fake news? You decide.
Diplomatic officials may have been targeted with an unknown weapon in Havana. But a recording of one “sonic attack” actually is the singing of a very loud cricket, a new analysis concludes.

In November 2016, American diplomats in Cuba complained of persistent, high-pitched sounds followed by a range of symptoms, including headaches, nausea and hearing loss.
Exams of nearly two dozen of them eventually revealed signs of concussions or other brain injuries, and speculation about the cause turned to weapons that blast sound or microwaves...

On Friday, two scientists presented evidence that those sounds were not so mysterious after all.

They were made by crickets, the researchers concluded. more

Fact: Buddy Holly released chirping crickets in 1957, and died about two years later. Just coincidence? You decide.

Protecting Trade Secrets in Court Requires Special Security, Like TSCM

Federal prosecutors said a Chinese national employed by an Oklahoma petroleum company has been charged with stealing trade secrets.

Authorities said Hongjin Tan, 35, is accused of stealing trade secrets from his unnamed U.S.-based employer that operates a research facility in the Tulsa area.

An affidavit filed by the FBI alleges that Tan stole trade secrets about an unidentified product worth between $1.4 and $1.8 billion to his employer to benefit a Chinese company where Tan had been offered work. more

Gal Shpantzer, SANS NewsBites news editor notes... "Have you discussed the concept of trade secrets with your legal counsel? Trade secrets are only legally protected if you secure them in a certain manner, above and beyond normal confidential data. www.justice.gov: Reporting Intellectual Property Crime: A Guide for Victims of Copyright Infringement, Trademark Counterfeiting, and Trade Secret Theft (PDF)

Judge: "When did you last check for bugs?"

TSCM - Technical Surveillance Countermeasures

If Spies Rip You Off Due to Your Own Gross Negligence

S. Korea - The government decided to increase penalties against those who illegally transfer technology.

Under the currently law, the penalty for committing espionage involving core national technologies is a maximum of 15 years in jail. The government plans to change the duration to at least three years, with no limits...

Information security gross negligence. (Murray Associates case history photo)

Regardless of whether the offense was intentional or the result of gross negligence, the guilty party will have to pay treble damages, while the government will seize all gains realized from the illegal transfer. more
 ...very similar to a cunning plan for the United States, first proposed in 2012.

Practice Saying, "Yes Master"...like you really mean it!

ROBOTS spying on your social media profiles could stop you from getting your dream job.

Recruitment AI used by companies to pick out applicants scans your posts for signs you might not be right for the role.

Known as DeepSense, the tool assesses your personality based on your online activity – even if you haven't applied for the role and don't know you're being assessed. The language you use, your photos, how often you post and more is merged into a data profile that tells recruiters your interests, teamwork skills, how extroverted or introverted you are, and even your emotional stability. more

Interesting Trends in Counterespionage

 

A new year with new awareness, or just practitioners tuning up their websites?

Security Ponder - How Big is Your Digital Footprint?

2019 may be the year you consider smaller shoes...
Those of us at a certain age grew up in a simpler time. Email was largely unheard of. There was no social media, no Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. There was no e-commerce, no Amazon, Alibaba or Taobao. No online banking. No online dating. Credit card transactions were processed manually. Local businesses accepted personal checks.

In short, there really wasn’t any such thing as a “digital footprint,” where personal information resides virtually, in an electronic ether, potentially available for anyone to see.

But over the last two decades, we’ve moved more and more of our lives into that realm. And almost as soon as we began, people attempted to gain inappropriate access to information of all kinds...

Will we have to change our standards... Time will tell. But there’s no denying our expanding digital footprints are changing the nature of both personal and organizational security.

Monitoring and managing our online personas has become an essential task...  more  sing-a-long

Happy New Year! It's 1984 ...in 2019

Students at more than 10 schools in Guizhou Province, one of China’s poorest provinces, and the neighboring Guangxi region are now required to wear “intelligent uniforms,” which are embedded with electronic chips that track their movements.

The uniforms allow school officials, teachers, and parents to keep track of the exact times that students leave or enter the school, Lin Zongwu, principal of the No. 11 School of Renhuai in Guizhou Province, told the state-run newspaper Global Times on Dec. 20.

If students skip school without permission, an alarm will be triggered.

If students try to game the system by swapping uniforms, an alarm also will sound, as facial-recognition equipment stationed at the school entrance can match a student’s face with the chip embedded in the uniform. more

FutureWatch: Chips embedded in the students.

German Football Club Caught Spying with a Drone

‘We didn‘t do anything illegal!‘
Spy games: German club admit to spying on rivals using drones

German football was stunned at the news that Werder Bremen one of the biggest clubs in the Bundesliga spied on training sessions of rivals Hoffenheim by using drones piloted by club officials...

And remarkably, Werder Bremen has issued a statement taking responsibility for the incident, admitting it was they who arranged for the drone to conduct surveillance of Hoffenheim‘s training session.

An official statement was released, explaining that the drone was piloted by a member of club staff, while the club‘s general manager Frank Bauman made a formal apology and took full responsibility for the incident. more

Spy Book Collection for Kids

Can an undercover nerd become a superstar agent? Ben Ripley sure hopes so—and his life may depend on it!

When Ben Ripley is recruited to the CIA’s Academy of Espionage, it’s a dream come true. But as soon as he gets on campus, Ben finds out that Spy School is way more deadly than debonair. And given his total lack of coordination and failure to grasp even the most basic spying skills, Ben begins to wonder what he’s doing here in the first place.



Luckily, through a series of hilarious misadventures, Ben realizes he could actually become a halfway decent spy…if he can survive all the attempts being made on his life! more

FutureWatch: Spy Technology of the Future

An Exciting Future for Spy Technology

1. Real-Time Facial Surveillance That Doesn't Require Clear, Unobstructed Images
2. Tools That Detect Activity Based on a Phone's Characteristics
3. Increased Uses for Artificial Intelligence
4. Technology to Detect Suspicious Body Language



Although it's not possible to know exactly how espionage experts will depend on the things on this list and others, it's evident that technology will help spies achieve their missions. It may also allow them to diversify their responsibilities as tech takes care of past tasks. more

Being Your Own Bodyguard, by Richard Roth (Kindle)

Click to enlarge.

Foreword by The Honorable Carlos C. Campbell

Rich Roth condenses over four decades of experience as a member of the United States Secret Service, and as a private security consultant and bodyguard.

His business portfolio includes cyber security, executive protection, aircraft and airport vulnerability, threat assessment and mitigation, training, perimeter detection and CCTV systems design and crisis management.

From the plazas of Paris, to dodging the guns in the Gaza strip, to the cafes in Caracas, Roth slips out of the shadows of surveillance to inform readers about how they can protect themselves through situational awareness, adaptation, and employ techniques and tactics for survival and mitigation.

Being Your Own Bodyguard deals with physical layouts and boundaries, psychological characteristics, and physiognomic [facial expressions] clues in assessing threats. Rich draws heavily on his experience with the USSS that includes over one hundred protection assignments. more

Security Director Alert - Well Produced Information Security Awareness Videos for Employees

Foreign intelligence entities, which may include foreign governments, corporations, and their proxies, are actively targeting information, assets, and technologies that are vital to both U.S. national security and our global competitiveness. 

Increasingly, U.S. companies are in the cross-hairs of these foreign intelligence entities, which are breaching private computer networks, pilfering American business secrets and innovation, and carrying out other illicit activities.

The National Counterintelligence and Security Center is dedicated to raising awareness among government employees and private industry about these foreign intelligence threats, the risks they pose, and the defensive measures necessary for individuals and organizations to safeguard that which has been entrusted to their protection.

The following products will enable personnel to better understand these threats and provide guidance and tips for protecting the sensitive information, assets, technologies, and networks to which employees have access. It will also serve to help them protect their personal, confidential information that may be used by others to gain their trust. more

Videos:
Social Media Deception Trailer
Social Media Deception
Social Media Deception Full Video
Social Engineering
Spear Phishing (30 second trailer)
Spear Phishing 2017
Spear Phishing Full Video
Travel Awareness
Human Targeting
Supply Chain Risk Management
Economic Espionage  (True story.)

Infographic - Check Your Phone for Spies

There is a lot which can be done to check your phone for spyware. 
Everything from following instructions in a book to a full forensic inspection.

In the meantime, you can start with this...

You can find a slightly larger version here.

Yet another Spy Museum Opens

The KGB Spy Museum (in New York City) features the largest collection of USSR KGB espionage artifacts.

The KGB, an initialism for КГБ Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti translated in English as Committee for State Security, was the main security agency for the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, KGB always wanted to compete with the CIA in all possible ways.

Interactive spy museum presents to visitors that era special technique: spy cameras, KGB concealment devices, secret recorders, crypto and cipher machines, spy radios, secure telephones...

The museum exhibition, much of which is only now being made public, presents a never-before-seen collection of items covering the activities of prominent KGB agents and revealing the strategies and methods that underlay many of history’s top secret espionage operations. more