Rutland wasn’t the cloak-and-dagger type — he was one of the best known,
and most well-liked, figures in L.A. society circles. “Squared jaw;
well poised; highly intelligent; good personality; modest; gives
appearance of affluence and breeding,” read the 300-page FBI dossier on
Rutland, which was only recently declassified. more
A former Monsanto employee pleaded guilty to espionage charges Thursday for stealing trade secrets from the U.S. agriculture behemoth for the benefit of China, prosecutors said.
Xiang Haitao, 44, a Chinese national who resided in Chesterfield, Mo., worked as an imaging scientist for Monsanto and its subsidiary The Climate Corporation from 2008, and was arrested a day after leaving his company in June of 2017 while awaiting to board a flight to China in possession of a one-way ticket and electronic devices...
The ‘NoReboot’ technique is the ultimate in persistence for iPhone malware, preventing reboots and enabling remote attackers to do anything on the device while remaining completely unseen.
The stealthy technique, dubbed “NoReboot” by researchers, is “the ultimate persistence bug,” according to a ZecOps analysis this week...
ZecOps researchers noted that even though they call the issue a “persistence bug,” it can’t actually be patched because “it’s not exploiting any…bugs at all — only playing tricks with the human mind.” Via Twitter, the firm said that the technique works on every version of iPhone, and to prevent it, Apple would need to build in a hardware-based indicator for iPhone sleep/wake/off status.
To protect themselves, iPhone users should run standard checks for malware and trojanized apps, and take the usual vetting precautions when downloading and installing new apps. more
A British intelligence official has thanked China for "free publicity" after state media posted a James Bond spoof in a misguided attempt to mock western intelligence agencies.
Beijing-backed Xinhua news posted a spoof video on Twitter with a tongue-in-cheek caption claiming to have found a "leaked video" of a "secret meeting" between MI6 - the organization that employs famous fictional spy James Bond - and CIA agents after British Chief of Secret Intelligence Service Richard Moore announced that the UK considered China its "single greatest priority."
The video drew a rare response from Moore... more
"Gloworm" Eavesdropping and Air-Gaped Computer Hacks
Documented in a report published in the February 2022 issue of the peer-reviewed journal, researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba, Israel, set out to unpack how well goldfish can navigate terrestrial environments when tasked with the right tools. They created a small camera-equipped fish tank on wheels, which they call an FOV, and put six goldfish in it, one at a time.
The fish managed to avoid dead ends and correct inaccuracies... Goldfish navigate land very well, it turns out. more
(Next up, Exocoetidaes in airplanes.)
First, we switched on the Chatter phone, which activates its Bluetooth connection, paired a phone over Bluetooth, then switched off Bluetooth to simulate someone walking the phone out of range. We then paired another phone with the Chatter without hindrance, allowing us to remotely control the Chatter’s audio.
Mattel, which makes the Chatter phone, said the phone “will time out if no connection is made or once the pairing occurs — it is only discoverable within a narrow window of time and requires physical access to the device.” We left the Chatter on and found the Bluetooth pairing process did not time out after more than an hour.
Then, Munro asked what would happen if we called the phone connected to the Chatter. Sure enough, the Chatter rang — loudly — as expected. Then we called the Chatter again, this time without properly replacing its receiver. With the handset off the hook, the Chatter automatically answered the call, immediately activating the handset’s microphone and allowing us to hear ambient background audio. more
The cell phone of Hanan Elatr was infected several months before he was killed in 2018.
Jamal Khashoggi was killed in Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul, reported Sputnik citing The Washington Post. The phone of Elatr was reportedly infected when she was questioned by UAE officials. more
According to security experts, vulnerabilities in processors produced by Taiwanese firm MediaTek could have allowed malicious apps to spy on their users.
MediaTek, one of the world's leading chip-makers, last month issued a fix for four bugs disclosed by researchers at cyber firm Check Point.
Its circuitry is found in one in three of the world’s smartphones, including high-end handsets from Xiaomi, Oppo, Realme, Vivo and more.
Check Point detailed the vulnerabilities exposed by its crack team of cyber buffs in a blog post last week. more
Honus, a former bicycle industry designer turned professional jeweler can teach you how to make your own spy ring.
This is how spies (and corrupt employees) can sneak file cabinets of documentation out of companies, no matter how good their security is. more
more spy rings
Secret Message Decoder Ring Great Christmas gift
Ever wish you had a mobile phone that would really turn heads?
One where you could call your friends, real or imaginary?
One that would look at you with loving eyes?
Your past is now your future...
Now, researchers at Princeton University and the University of Washington have overcome these obstacles with an ultracompact camera the size of a coarse grain of salt. The new system can produce crisp, full-color images on par with a conventional compound camera lens 500,000 times larger in volume, the researchers reported in a paper published Nov. 29 in Nature Communications...
Heide (Felix Heide, the study's senior author and an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton) and his colleagues are now working to add more computational abilities to the camera itself. Beyond optimizing image quality, they would like to add capabilities for object detection and other sensing modalities relevant for medicine and robotics.
Heide also envisions using ultracompact imagers to create "surfaces
as sensors." "We could turn individual surfaces into cameras that have
ultra-high resolution, so you wouldn't need three cameras on the back of
your phone anymore, but the whole back of your phone would become one
giant camera. We can think of completely different ways to build devices
in the future," he said. more
The lawsuit is the second of its kind — Facebook sued NSO in 2019 for targeting its WhatsApp users — and another consequential move by a private company to curb invasive spyware by governments and the companies that provide their spy tools.
Apple, for the first time, seeks to hold NSO accountable for what it says was the surveillance and targeting of Apple users. more
via theregister.com
"Sriram Sami, Bangjie Sun, and Sean Rui Xiang Tan, from National University of Singapore, and Jun Han from Yonsei University, describe how this might be done in a paper [PDF] titled "LAPD: Hidden Spy Camera Detection using Smartphone Time-of-Flight Sensors"...
...smartphones are commonplace these days, so adding an app like LAPD is likely to be more convenient than carrying a dedicated bug or signal detector at all times. LAPD's goal is to be accessible, usable, and accurate, and to judge by the results reported in the paper, it hits those marks...
"The 'attackers' have all the power to place hidden cameras anywhere, and the public is, in contrast, generally defenseless," he explained. "That's why we're doing this work, and why we hope hidden camera detection can become more commonplace." Sami said he intends to release the source code for LAPD but has to coordinate that with his colleagues." more
