Criminal Group Accused of Wiretapping State Officals & Companies

The Sverdlovsk Region law enforcement officers apprehended several members of a criminal group over a case of illegal wiretapping of state officials and lawmakers...

"On March 30, police officers carried out a series of searches at residences of members of a criminal group as part of a case ‘on illegal wiretapping.’ The searches took place at 13 locations simultaneously. The wide-scale operation was triggered by an attempt of a key suspect to hide abroad. He was apprehended on March 27 during an attempt to cross the border with Kazakhstan," the source said.

According to the source, the wiretapping of city administration officials and city Duma deputies, as well as regional authorities and representatives of major companies took place in the fall of 2019. more

Spy-turned-TV Host Anna Chapman Urges Russians to Get Vaccinated

Anna Chapman, the Russian intelligence agent busted for spying in the Big Apple in 2010, has now taken on a new mission – persuading vaccine doubters in the Motherland to be jabbed against COVID-19.

The flamed-haired former femme fatale told viewers on REN TV that “the health of your loved ones depends on your decision.”

Chapman, who had been working in real estate in New York, made headlines in 2010 when she was revealed to be part of a Russian sleeper cell.

She was deported to Russia shortly after along with nine other spies as part of a massive prisoner swap and is now a TV presenter. more

Intel Sued Under Wiretapping Laws

FL - A class-action suit in Lake County, Florida, alleges that Intel unlawfully intercepted communications without user consent. The claim is backed by the usage of analytics technology on Intel’s company website. Intel capitalizes on session-replay software to capture the interactions of people visiting the corporate homepage, a violation of user rights.

According to the lawsuit, Intel is violating the Florida state wiretapping law by capturing keystrokes, mouse movements, and other similar session-replay tech. more

G. Gordon Liddy, convicted Watergate conspirator, dies at 90

G. Gordon Liddy, the political operative who supervised the Watergate burglary, which brought down President Richard Nixon, died Tuesday, his family said. He was 90.

Liddy's family said in a statement that he died Tuesday morning at his daughter's home in Mount Vernon, Virginia. It did not give a cause of death. His son, James, said that the cause was not related to Covid-19, and that he had been dealing with Parkinson's disease.

Liddy was one of the organizers of the 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the office building with the name that would forever be linked to one of the biggest political scandals in American history...

Liddy was convicted of conspiracy, burglary and wiretapping in 1973 and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Years later, he declared, "I'd do it again for my president."...

In an interview with WHYY "Fresh Air" in 1980 after the publication of his autobiography, Liddy described unusual ways of overcoming fears as a child, including rats.

He went to the waterfront to confront the rats, but they would swim away. When his sister's cat killed a rat, he decided to eat it. "And so I cooked and consumed part of the rat. And thereafter, I had no fear of rats," Liddy said. more

Breaking: Billions of Online Trading Broker Records Have Been Leaked

Researchers at WizCase have discovered a massive data leak that belongs to FBS, a Cyprus-based online trading broker used by millions of traders in over 190 countries. 

The leak includes sensitive personally identifiable information (PII), financial information, government documents, numbers, and even passwords in plaintext form...

The consequences for the exposed individuals are grave, ranging from identity theft and banking fraud to scams, phishing, blackmailing, and even business espionage. The details that have been exposed are just too revealing, and mitigating the risks now is very complicated – if at all possible.

If you were using FBS, you should reset all your passwords, enable 2FA and monitor your bank account activity closely. more

Industrial Espionage Quote of the Week: Most In-Demand Career

"...companies are increasingly at risk from hacking and industrial espionage. Protecting data and defending corporate networks is poised to be one of the most in-demand careers of the future." — Doros Hadjizenonos, Regional sales manager at Fortinet  more

Iowa Passes New Electronic Surveillance Law

IA - New penalties for those found guilty of trespassing to set up electronic surveillance equipment on someone else's property to secretly capture images or video have passed in the House.  

Iowa legislators have been trying to enhance trespassing laws for nearly a decade in response to undercover operations in large-scale livestock operations. Republican Representative Jarad (JAIR-ud) Klein of Keota says the bill addresses somebody that has ill intentions and wants access to somewhere where they don't have a reason to be. 

Critics say the bill could be used to shield those who are mistreating animals or it could prevent reporting of unsafe working conditions in Iowa meatpacking plants. more

How Grandma Hears Everything...

 …and why your business should care. 

There is a new eavesdropping spy trick in town. You could get burned unless you know about it.

Let’s start with Grandma. She is hard of hearing. A while back the family gave her money to buy two new hearing aids. Nice. Now she has stopped saying, “WHAT!” all the time. She hears everything clearly. 

There is only one problem. She seems to  hear everyone’s conversations even when she is not in the room. Sometimes she is in her room with the door closed. 

It’s a mystery, but we’ll figure it out soon. more

Cars Know Your Location. A Spy Firm Wants to Sell It to the Military

• 15 billion car locations.
• Nearly any country on Earth.
‘The Ulysses Group’ is pitching a powerful surveillance technology to the U.S. government.

A surveillance contractor that has previously sold services to the U.S. military is advertising a product that it says can locate the real-time locations of specific cars in nearly any country on Earth. It says it does this by using data collected and sent by the cars and their components themselves, according to a document obtained by Motherboard.

"Ulysses can provide our clients with the ability to remotely geolocate vehicles in nearly every country except for North Korea and Cuba on a near real time basis," the document, written by contractor The Ulysses Group, reads. "Currently, we can access over 15 billion vehicle locations around the world every month," the document adds. more

Placed in my Grain of Salt file until I can verify.

Spy Tech: Listening May be the Key to Cloning Your Key Says Spikey

Physical locks are one of the most prevalent mechanisms for securing objects such as doors. While many of these locks are vulnerable to lock-picking, they are still widely used as lock-picking requires specific training with tailored instruments, and easily raises suspicion. 

In this paper, we propose SpiKey, a novel attack that significantly lowers the bar for an attacker as opposed to the lock-picking attack, by requiring only the use of a smartphone microphone to infer the shape of victim’s key, namely bittings (or cut depths) which form the secret of a key. 

When a victim inserts his/her key into the lock, the emitted sound is captured by the attacker’s microphone. SpiKey leverages the time difference between audible clicks to ultimately infer the bitting information, i.e., shape of the physical key.

As a proof-of-concept, we provide a simulation, based on real-world recordings, and demonstrate a significant reduction in search space from a pool of more than 330 thousand keys to three candidate keys for the most frequent case. more

Ion Mihai Pacepa, Key Cold War Defector, Dies at 92

A general in the Romanian intelligence service, he later revealed the corruption and cruelty behind his country’s Communist regime. He died of Covid-19.

Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, a senior Romanian intelligence official and an adviser to his country’s president, Nicolae Ceaucescu, arrived in Bonn, West Germany, one day in June 1978 on a diplomatic mission. Mr. Ceaucescu had given him a message for the German chancellor — and orders to devise a plan to assassinate an American journalist who covered Romania.

An engineer who specialized in industrial espionage, Mr. Pacepa had no interest in murder. And so, he entered the U.S. Embassy and announced his intention to defect. When he landed at Andrews Air Force Base a few days later, he became one of the highest-ranking officials to flee the Soviet bloc during the Cold War.

Mr. Ceaucescu offered a $2 million reward for his death, and reportedly hired Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, a Venezuelan terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal, to find him. more

Poor Due Diligence Can Carry a Costly Bite

A failure to properly consider cyber security in M&A due diligence could be a ticking time bomb for companies, with undiscovered breaches leading to reputational damage and multimillion-dollar fines.

The warning from consulting giant Accenture comes as cyber security firm McAfee unveils an espionage campaign linked to a Chinese hacking group it said is targeting telcos in the US, Europe and south-east Asia. more

Cyber is only one M&A due diligence technical precaution to undertake.

Secret Recordings & a High Stakes Divorce

UK - A judge is overseeing a private divorce court hearing featuring a member of one of Britain's most famous business families and his estranged wife.

Sir Frederick Barclay, 86, and Lady Hiroko Barclay, 78, are both expected to give evidence at the virtual trial in the Family Division of the High Court...

The nephews - all sons of his twin brother David - allegedly made over 94 hours of secret recordings as part of what his lawyers have described as 'commercial espionage on a vast scale'. more | Some of the bugging video.

In Recent Spy News...

Spies may have been among those forced to work remotely by the coronavirus pandemic, say researchers from the Finnish Security and Intelligence Service Supo... According to Supo researcher Veli-Pekka Kivimäki, the number of online espionage targets has risen in part because of the increase in the number of people working remotely. more

The U.S. intelligence community concluded with “high confidence” that China didn’t attempt to change the outcome of the 2020 election, an assessment that contradicts repeated assertions by former President Donald Trump and his allies. more

Email-management provider Mimecast has confirmed that a network intrusion used to spy on its customers was conducted by the same advanced hackers responsible for the SolarWinds supply chain attack. more

Privacy-focussed search engine DuckDuckGo (DDG) called out Google for spying on users after the latter updated privacy labels on Apple’s App Store to show the type of data it collects from users. more

Iran has charged a French tourist with spying and “spreading propaganda against the system,” his lawyer said Monday, the latest in a series of cases against foreigners at a time of heightened tensions between Iran and the West. more

A 22-year-old Army personnel has been arrested on charges of spying and leaking confidential information to Pakistani agents. Akash Mehria, who hails from Sikar, was allegedly honey-trapped and was supplying information to woman Pakistani agents. more

Podcast studio Wondery has released the first audio trailer for Spy Affair, a new six-part miniseries. The show, which premieres March 30th on Apple Podcasts, investigates the true story of Russian gun advocate Maria Butina, who was convicted in 2018 of conspiring to act as a foreign agent within the United States. more

China to soon try 2 Canadians on spying charges... A Communist Party newspaper says China will soon begin trials for two Canadians arrested in apparent retaliation for Canada's detention of a senior executive for Chinese communications giant Huawei Technologies. more

How to Hire a Genuine Hacker For Cell Phone Spying Easily... Would you like to hire a genuine hacker for cell phone spying anonymously? All we know that finding real professional hackers on the internet is as difficult as finding water in the desert. We have come to highlight some of the special aspects of cell phone hacking to alleviate your suffering. more

In post-war Armenia, spy mania running amok... Two spy scandals involving well-regarded organizations speak to Armenians’ loss of faith in the international community, as well as the opposition’s interest in taking advantage of that mistrust. Our weekly Post-war Report. more

Google Jumps into Your Nest with its Own New Nest

Google has launched a new ‘Nest Hub’ home assistant that tracks its owners’ sleep.

It comes in a range of colors, and can be ordered today. Like the existing Nest Hub, it can show photos and videos from Google’s owner services like YouTube and Google Photos, integrates with other services such as Netflix, and can be used to control the home.

But its standout feature is its new sleep tracking technology. To use it, the Nest Hub is supposed to be placed on a bedside table, so that it can monitor its owners as they sleep. 

It can not only track the amount of sleep, and how deep it is, but also other things that might disturb that sleep – as well as other people sharing the bed – such as coughing and snoring. more

Interesting points...
• Google says the recorded audio and raw Soli data stays on the device and does not get sent to Google, though extrapolated sleep event data is sent to the company’s servers.
• Sleep Sensing (Google’s name for sleep tracking) is completely opt-in and can be disabled at any time.
• This will be a paid feature.
For some people this will be helpful and worth it. For others, it is AI creepy creep.
Hackers, on your mark! ...