Attack Can Decrypt 4G (LTE) Calls to Eavesdrop on Conversations

A team of academics has detailed this week a vulnerability in the Voice over LTE (VoLTE) protocol that can be used to break the encryption on 4G voice calls.

 Named ReVoLTE, researchers say this attack is possible because mobile operators often use the same encryption key to secure multiple 4G voice calls that take place via the same base station (mobile cell tower)...

Researchers say that the equipment to pull off a ReVoLTE attack costs around $7,000. While the price might seem steep, it is certainly in the price range of other 3G/4G mobile interception gear, usually employed by law enforcement or criminal gangs...

A scientific paper detailing the ReVoLTE attack is also available for download as PDF from here and here. The paper is titled "Call Me Maybe: Ea­ves­drop­ping En­cryp­ted LTE Calls With Re­VoL­TE." more

Eavesdropping: A Reader (book)

The earliest references to eavesdropping are found in law books. 

According to William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1769), 'eavesdroppers, or such as listen under walls or windows, or the eaves of a house, to hearken after discourse, and thereupon to frame slanderous and mischievous tales, are a common nuisance and presentable at the court-leet'. 

Today, however, eavesdropping is not only legal, it's ubiquitous – unavoidable. What was once a minor public-order offence has become one of the key political and legal problems of our time, as the Snowden revelations made clear.

Eavesdropping addresses the capture and control of our sonic world by state and corporate interests, alongside strategies of resistance. For editors James Parker (Melbourne Law School) and Joel Stern (Liquid Architecture), eavesdropping isn't necessarily malicious. 

We cannot help but hear too much, more than we mean to. Eavesdropping is a condition of social life. And the question is not whether to eavesdrop, therefore, but how. buy or free (pdf)

1650 Kircher Musurgia Listening Devices

The book Musurgia Universalis is famous and has been since it appeared in 1650. 

Vol. 2 (Af-x.10): plate between pages 302 & 303

The illustration depicts a piazza-listening device.

The voices from the piazza are taken by the horn up through the mouth of the statue in the room on the piano nobile above, allowing both espionage and the appearance of a miraculous event. more

The modern eavesdropping equivalent is the ventilation plenum. Acoustical ducting is something most people don't consider when concerned about eavesdropping. We do.

Woman Charged with Wiretapping at Church

MD - A woman is facing felony wiretapping charges on allegations she secretly recorded board meetings at the Four Quarters Interfaith Sanctuary.

Rosanna E. Tufts, 61, of Cockeysville, was charged with 11 counts of interception, disclosure or use of wire, electronic or oral communication. more

Corporate Espionage Quote of the Week

"The threat model in corporate espionage is absolutely one of theft of property. It’s a lot easier to steal somebody’s laptop than to hack it." ~ toxik

National Security Concerns — Executive Orders Against TikTok

President Trump issued two executive orders late Thursday against China-based TikTok and messaging app WeChat, citing national security concerns in a sweeping order that could prevent the companies from doing most business in the United States....

“This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage,” the TikTok order reads. more

Satellite Comms Globally Open to $300 Eavesdropping Hack

Satellite internet communications are susceptible to eavesdropping and signal interception by far-flung attackers located in a different continent or country from their victims. And all they need is $300 worth of off-the-shelf equipment to pull it off...

Essentially what this means is that if they were able to perform an interception, adversaries could eavesdrop on vast sections of the globe. more

Stay Safe - Stay Feeling Good

This fun statement can be taken several ways...

• Anti Covid-19
• I'm not feeling very social right now!
• A warning to spies that you are protected against electronic surveillance. 

Available here.

Want to know more about protecting your privacy?
Visit us at https://counterespionage.com

Recent Spycam News

FL - A Bradenton man was arrested July 24 for shooting video of a girl undressing in a beach changing station. more & more

FL - Justin Stueve is accused of rape and video voyeurism of his then-wife, who said she found a thumb drive full of explicit photos of herself. A judge has ruled that defense attorneys will be allowed to review photos allegedly taken by their client of his ex-wife while she was unconscious. more 

Japan - Police in Tokyo have arrested a 34-year-old man and his 35-year-old common-law wife on suspicion of extortion after they threatened a man that they would report him to police for taking upskirt videos of the woman unless he paid them money...The man agreed to pay 1.1 million yen in return for not being reported to the police. more

WA - Former Arlington Christian teacher charged with voyeurism. more

UT - Deputies arrest 26-year-old for suspected voyeurism after parents find him on roof. more

WA - Outlook man charged with voyeurism of 15-year-old girl. more

LA - A Bossier Parish school teacher...at Benton Elementary School faces 30 new charges...(including) 10 counts of video voyeurism. more

UK - Firm pursues damage claims for victims of disgraced doctor...Given the large number of images taken it is possible many women who saw Dr Altaii were covertly filmed yet remain unaware of that fact even today. more

S. Korea - South Korean singer A investigated for illegally filming women...A is suspected of secretly filming the bodies of several women, including sex scenes, using hidden cameras until early this year...South Korea is notorious for illegal filming crimes also known as molka crimes. more

(BTW - Spycam Detection Training now has Korean sub-titles.)

Canada - A suspended Mountie charged with sex crimes by two different police services across the country is alleged to have secretly filmed women 34 times inside the bathroom of his south Ottawa apartment, during sex and in hotel rooms. more

FL - Robert Privette, 49, was staying at the DoubleTree resort in Key West when he is alleged to have heard two women in the room next door returning from the beach. Privette is then said to have managed to slide a tiny spy camera surreptitiously under the door of the room in order to film the pair, aged 24 and 27, as they undressed after a day on the sands. more

AR - A 41-year-old man accused of secretly videotaping a female teenager with a hidden camera in a Bluetooth speaker is facing video voyeurism and child pornography charges. more

India - A man arrested for voyeurism jumped into the sea while being taken to the beach by the police to collect evidence on Wednesday. His hands were cuffed. His body is yet to be found. more

UK - A former presenter of BBC News...who has shifted his career from being a British TV news personality to evangelical preaching, said most of these offences were committed with children during the past 30 years...He also admitted to two counts of making explicit videos of children... more

UK - A man has admitted using a hidden camera to film people using the toilet in Bristol...Prosecutor May Li said Andrews was discovered when one of the victims noticed a green light above a doorway and saw it was a hidden camera. When she looked at what was in the memory card, she saw Andrews’ face in the footage. (Darwin Award) more

You too can find hidden spy cameras. more

Personal Alert: Home Sellers Eavesdropping on Buyers

You never want to reveal too much enthusiasm when home shopping. But now many are giving away their hand before they ever get inside. more

NSA Tells Mobile Users Beware of Find-My-Phone

Beware of find-my-phone, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth, NSA tells mobile users

And don't forget to limit ad tracking. Advisory contains a host of recommendations.

The National Security Agency is recommending that some government workers and people generally concerned about privacy turn off find-my-phone, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth whenever those services are not needed, as well as limit location data usage by apps.

“Location data can be extremely valuable and must be protected,” an advisory published on Tuesday stated. “It can reveal details about the number of users in a location, user and supply movements, daily routines (user and organizational), and can expose otherwise unknown associations between users and locations.” more

How to Hide from Drones in the Age of Surveillance

Drones of all sizes are being used by environmental advocates to monitor deforestation, by conservationists to track poachers, and by journalists and activists to document large protests. As a political sociologist who studies social movements and drones, I document a wide range of nonviolent and pro-social drone uses in my new book, “The Good Drone.” I show that these efforts have the potential to democratize surveillance...

...it’s time to think about how many eyes are in the sky and how to avoid unwanted aerial surveillance. One way that’s within reach of nearly everyone is learning how to simply disappear from view.

How to disappear

The first thing you can do to hide from a drone is to take advantage of the natural and built environment.  more tips 

DRONE SURVIVAL GUIDE (with info-graphics)

More Security Scrapbook drone posts

Staffing Firm Alleges Corporate Espionage by Former Employees

NY - Two Southern Tier staffing agencies are locked in a bitter dispute alleging corporate espionage, payroll sabotage, the breaching of non-compete and non-disclosure agreements, and the hijacking of a company Facebook page.

In a 54-page filing with the Federal District Court in Northern District earlier this month, Adecco accuses the upstart Staffworks of raiding its Corning, Elmira, Utica and Syracuse staff to steal proprietary account information and using it to steal long-established business...

• 
  Former employees commandeered a Adecco Corning office Facebook page for their own use, renaming it and taking control of posts.
• A former Adecco employee broke into locked office filing cabinets, drilling through locks, "to remove colleague personnel files and other Adecco documents containing confidential information." The employee contends she was only trying to obtain personal items from the locked cabinet.
• Proprietary pricing information and profit margin details was emailed from internal email accounts to personnel accounts before Adecco cut off access.
• Those named in the suit refused to return company laptops and mobile devices with critical and confidential client and company details.
• In their last weeks of employment , three defendants sabotaged client relationships by failing to enter information into a payroll system, later using the foul-up as evidence that Adecco was "going downhill," in an attempt to land new clients. more

Note to Adecco: Time for a thorough TSCM inspection. (search for eavesdropping devices)

The Vatican Hack

State-sponsored hackers have reportedly targeted Vatican computer networks in an attempt to give China an advantage in negotiations to renew a provisional deal with the Holy See.

A report, released July 28, said that hackers may have used a counterfeit condolence message from Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, to gain access to Vatican communications. more

Block TikTok, or Microsoft to the Rescue

U.S. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, claimed that TikTok sends user data to China, exerting pressure on the video-sharing social networking service. Pompeo brought attention to the fact that if personal information flows across a Chinese server, it will eventually end up in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party which he calls an “Evil Empire”.

TikTok has denied U.S. allegations but a report by cyber experts at ProtonMail says otherwise. The report is more a warning as it states – “Beware, the social media giant not only collects troves of personal data on you, but also cooperates with the CCP, extending China’s surveillance and censorship reach beyond its borders.” more

In other news...
Microsoft said Sunday it will continue talks to buy short-form video app, TikTok after its chief executive spoke with President Trump, following a weekend of uncertainty clouding the future of the Chinese-owned app. more

Connect the Dots...
When Microsoft bought Skype, Wired Magazine noted, "The Skype client itself is written almost as if it were a piece of malware, using complex obfuscation and anti-reverse engineering techniques, and it would be disquieting for Microsoft to release something that behaved in such a shady way; at the very least, the client would surely have to be rewritten to avoid the obfuscation and outright hostility to managed networks that Skype currently has... Ultimately, it's hard to see how the Skype purchase is worthwhile from a technology or user-access perspective. The technology isn't good enough and the users aren't lucrative enough or plentiful enough to justify it. more

Pure Conjecture Disguised as Analysis...
Microsoft already had Windows Live Messenger. Did it really need Skype? Skype you might recall was a predominately Estonian-based encrypted platform. It was giving governments fits worldwide. Then, in 2011, Microsoft bought it. Guess what happened.

TikTok, it appears, is also giving government fits. Who ya gonna call?