A former police records clerk in Southern California was sentenced to six years in jail Friday after he was charged with secretly recording dozens of coworkers as they used the bathroom.
The sentencing for 29-year-old Sergio Nieto came after he pleaded no contest to dozens of invasion of privacy charges in October for spying on 69 coworkers(stop snickering) during his time working at the Long Beach Police Department’s downtown headquarters, the Long Beach Post reports. more
A growing array of so-called smart surveillance products have made it easy to secretly live-stream or record what other people are saying or doing. Consumer spending on surveillance cameras in the United States will reach $4 billion in 2023, up from $2.1 billion in 2018, according to the technology market research firm Strategy Analytics. Unit sales of consumer surveillance devices are expected to more than double from last year.
The problem is all that gear is not necessarily being used to fight burglars or keep an eye on the dog while she’s home alone. Tiny cameras have been found in places where they shouldn’t be, like Airbnb rentals, public bathrooms and gym locker rooms. So often, in fact, that security experts warn that we are in the throes of a “bugging epidemic.”more
Spybuster Tip #621: Conduct your own sweeps for covert spycams. Learn how.
The recent resignation of a compliance director at GitLab Inc. illustrates anxiety in the tech industry about foreign espionage...
GitLab’s vice president of engineering, Eric Johnson, said in GitLab’s public discussion forum in October that the firm would no longer hire people living in Russia and China—countries that U.S. authorities have linked to major data security breaches—for some roles where they would be handling sensitive customer data...
The decision was prompted by “the expressed concern of several enterprise customers,” Mr. Johnson wrote on the forum... more
With iOS 12, Apple added a feature, called Live Listen, which essentially turns your AirPods into on-demand hearing aids.
There's a bit of setup you'll need to do, but once it's done, you can place your phone on a table closer to the person you're talking to and it will send audio to your AirPods.
On your iPhone go to Settings > Control Center > Customize Controls and tap on the green "+" symbol next to the Hearing option. Then, when you need to use the feature put in your AirPods and open Control Center on your iPhone and select the Hearing icon followed by Live Listen. Turn off the feature by repeating those final steps in Control Center. more
Corporate Espionage Alert: If a person excuses themselves from a business meeting to go to the restroom (or other excuse)... NEVER continue the discussion thinking they won't know. They may be using this trick to listen in to what you are saying. More sage corporate counterespionage advice here.
Since voice-controlled digital assistants were introduced a few years ago, security experts have fretted that systems like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa were a privacy threat and could be easily hacked.
But the risk presented by a cleverly pointed light was probably not on anyone’s radar. Researchers in Japan and at the University of Michigan said Monday that they had found a way to take over Google Home, Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri devices from hundreds of feet away by shining laser pointers, and even flashlights, at the devices’ microphones. more
South Africa - The increased use of unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, in SA over the last few years has opened local organisations to a significant and evolving scope of threat in areas such as cyber espionage, illegal surveillance, electronic snooping and reconnaissance.
Security experts warn that while drone technology is increasingly being harnessed to carry out a host of commercial tasks faster, safer and more efficiently across industries including agriculture, media, health and defence, it is also increasingly being exploited by criminals as a tool to usher in a new era of physical and IT security threats. more
• Our other Security Scrapbook drone coverage. • Researching anti-drone technology for your corporate security department? Contact us for our free Anti-Drone Research Paper.
A Phoenix-based flight attendant has sued Southwest Airlines for retaliation after she reported two pilots for live streaming secret lavatory video onto an iPad in the cockpit.
Renee Steinaker says...she saw an iPad mounted to the jet’s windshield where she could see the pilot in the restroom. She says the co-pilot then told her that the cameras were a new “top secret security measure” which Steinmaker later determined was not true.
She claims that the pilots also left the aircraft unattended after landing the flight, and “left a loaded firearm unattended in the cockpit” which violates FAA regulations. more
The two pilots, both based near Southwest's Dallas headquarters, have denied the allegations in court documents. So has the airline, which dismissed the incident as an "inappropriate attempt at humor" in a statement. more
"Southwest
Airlines has never placed cameras and never videoed anyone in any
lavatory, and the pilots on Flight 1088 did not video anyone. The
incident, which occurred over two years ago, was a poor attempt at humor
where the pilot took a selfie video from the chest up, fully clothed,
in the lavatory of a completely different airplane months before Flight
1088 and then replayed the exact same selfie video on his iPad when Ms.
Steinaker came into the cockpit." more
Facebook launched a new front in the battle over encryption yesterday by suing the Israeli spyware firm NSO Group for allegedly hacking WhatsApp, its encrypted messaging service, and helping government customers snoop on about 1,400 victims...
The lawsuit marks the first time a messaging service has sued a spyware company for undermining its encryption and it could prompt a slew of suits against companies that have developed encryption workarounds bolstering governments' ability to spy on their citizens. more
Analysis: More organizations are hardening their defenses against electronic surveillance and information theft. WithTSCM information security surveys becoming mainstream attacks will shift toward the defenseless...
Don't let the fancy attire and the Gilded Age setting fool you, there is nasty business afoot in "The Current War."
It's a power struggle, both literal and societal, with Benedict Cumberbatch as inventor Thomas Edison on one side, Michael Shannon as industrialist George Westinghouse on the other, Nicholas Hoult as eccentric visionary Nikola Tesla in the middle and the future of electricity in America hanging in the balance.
In theaters Friday, Oct. 25, the film is a tale of innovation advanced via moral compromise. There are dead animals, corporate espionage, even the invention of the electric chair all deployed in the battle to determine whether Edison's direct current or Westinghouse's alternating current would light up the nation.
It's a story rife with tragedy and squandered potential. more
The doctor accused of corporate espionage and stealing trade secrets from blood giant CSL to further his career and to land a job at rival group Pharming has been sacked from his job.
Dutch pharmaceutical company Pharming announced on Thursday that it had permanently terminated Joseph Chiao's employment.
Dr Chiao had been subject to a US court injunction preventing him from starting work at Pharming in October so that CSL and Pharming could investigate CSL's allegations that Dr Chiao had stolen 1,000,000 documents from CSL. more
A hacker admitted to planting hardware keyloggers on computers belonging to two companies to get unauthorized to their networks and steal proprietary data. He now faces 12 years of prison time.
It appears that the individual was after data relating to an "emerging technology" that both targeted companies were developing.
In February 2017, 45-year old Ankur Agarwal of Montville, New Jersey,trespassed the premises of one of the two tech companies and installed keylogging devices on its computers to capture employee usernames and passwords. He also added his laptop and a hard drive to the company's computer network. more
A new kind of easy to use trojan malware is gaining popularity among cyber criminals, providing them with simple means of stealing credit card data, passwords and cryptocurrency -- and it has already infected hundreds of thousands of Windows users around the world.
Raccoon Stealer first appeared in April this year and has quickly risen to become one of the most talked-about malware services in underground forums.
Researchers at Cybereason have been monitoring Raccoon since it first emerged, and note that while not sophisticated, it is aggressively marketed to potential criminal users, providing them with an easy-to-use back end, along with bulletproof hosting and 24/7 support -- all for $200 a month. more
Researchers at Germany’s SRLabs found two hacking scenarios — eavesdropping and phishing — for both Amazon Alexa
and Google Home/Nest devices. They created eight voice apps (Skills for
Alexa and Actions for Google Home) to demonstrate the hacks that turns
these smart speakers into smart spies. The malicious voice apps created
by SRLabs easily passed through Amazon and Google’s individual screening
processes...
For eavesdropping, the researchers used the same horoscope app for
Amazon’s smart speaker. The app tricks the user into believing that it
has been stopped while it silently listens in the background. more
The recent resignation of a compliance director at GitLab Inc. illustrates anxiety in the tech industry about foreign espionage...
With iOS 12, Apple added a feature, called Live Listen, which essentially turns your AirPods into on-demand hearing aids. 
In February 2017, 45-year old Ankur Agarwal of Montville, New Jersey, trespassed the premises of one of the two tech companies and installed keylogging devices on its computers to capture employee usernames and passwords. He also added his laptop and a hard drive to the company's computer network. more
Raccoon Stealer first appeared in April this year and has quickly risen to become one of the most talked-about malware services in underground forums.