Apple Self-Driving Industrial Espionage Case Ends in Sentencing

A former Apple engineer will spend four months in prison, bringing a lengthy and contentious case to a close six years after the U.S. government first charged the engineer, Xiaolang Zhang. 

9 to 5 Mac has been covering the case since shortly after it began, and their report on Zhang’s sentencing has a good overview of the issues to date.

The basics? Zhang worked for Apple in the U.S., where he worked on the company’s self-driving car project, Project Titan. He then left abruptly to work for another company, this one based in China, XMotors. When he did so, he brought several proprietary documents with him. Hence the charges against him, to which he eventually pleaded guilty. The Department of Justice also announced several charges in the case last year. more

A Bad Week for Spys

• Beijing accused of using spying, threats and blackmail against Tibetan exiles more

• Turkey says 4 suspects confess to spying on behalf of Mossad more

• Everything wrong with South Africa’s new spying law more

• The body of a former advisor to El Salvador's president showed signs of torture after he died this week while in custody on spying charges. more

• Ireland Refuses New Visa for Russian Diplomats Over Espionage Concerns more

• Accused Russian spy worked for U.K. intelligence, met with prime ministers and princes more

• US Worried About Chinese Smart Cars Spying On Americans more

• Russia jails Ukrainian woman for 10 years for spying more

• A woman who had a six-year relationship with the man of her dreams eventually discovered he was actually an undercover cop spying on her. more

• Lebanese resistance destroys spying equipment in Israeli garrison more

...and in spy movie news... 

• Argylle: A spy martini that's shaken, stirred and somehow still flat. more

• “Argylle” is still out snooping the competition. The spy action comedy remained in first place, raking in $1.96 million on Friday, its second in theaters... So far, the flick, which cost $200 million to make, hasn’t been performing as expected. more

Well, the trailer was fun.

AI Wi-Fi CCTV - Spooky

Scientists Are Getting Eerily Good at Using WiFi to 'See' People Through Walls in Detail
The signals from WiFi can be used to map a human body, according to a new paper.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University developed a method for detecting the three dimensional shape and movements of human bodies in a room, using only WiFi routers.

To do this, they used DensePose, a system for mapping all of the pixels on the surface of a human body in a photo. DensePose was developed by London-based researchers and Facebook’s AI researchers. From there, according to their recently-uploaded preprint paper published on arXiv, they developed a deep neural network that maps WiFi signals’ phase and amplitude sent and received by routers to coordinates on human bodies...

The Carnegie Mellon researchers wrote that they believe WiFi signals “can serve as a ubiquitous substitute” for normal RGB cameras, when it comes to “sensing” people in a room. Using WiFi, they wrote, overcomes obstacles like poor lighting and occlusion that regular camera lenses face. more  Interesting, but no need for the average person to worry.

Device Camera's Ambient Light Sensors Can Spy

The ambient light sensors responsible for smart devices’ brightness adjustments can capture images of touch interactions like swiping and tapping for hackers...

Unlike cameras, though, apps are not required to ask for permission to use these sensors. In a surprising discovery, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) uncovered that ambient light sensors are vulnerable to privacy threats when embedded on a smart device’s screen... An open-access paper on this work was published in Science Advances.

“This work turns your device's ambient light sensor and screen into a camera! Ambient light sensors are tiny devices deployed in almost all portable devices and screens that surround us in our daily lives,” says Princeton University professor Felix Heide, who was not involved with the paper. “As such, the authors highlight a privacy threat that affects a comprehensive class of devices and has been overlooked so far.” more  Interesting, but no need for the average person to worry.

Van Eck Redux: Hackers Can Spy on Cameras Through Walls

Capturing real-time video through walls isn’t hard if you have an antenna and a little bit of engineering know-how. It could be a massive threat to billions of security and phone cameras... 

Kevin Fu, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern who specializes in cybersecurity, has figured out a way to eavesdrop on most modern cameras, from home security cameras and dash cams to the camera on your phone. Called EM Eye, short for Electromagnetic Eye, the technique can capture the video from another person’s camera through walls in real time. It redefines the idea of a Peeping Tom...

Results vary on how far away someone would have to be in order to eavesdrop on these different devices. For some, a peeping Tom would have to be less than 1 foot away; for others, they could be as far away as 16 feet...

Fu says. “Maybe you don’t want to put this [camera] on your wall you share with your neighbor.” more
Van Eck  Interesting, but no need for the average person to worry.

Corporate Security Alert: Google's Spyware Report

Spyware risks are rising fast, and you should definitely be worried — even Google says so...

Companies developing spyware and offering spying services to government agencies and threat actors around the world are growing in number, and to make matters worse, for all of them - business is good.

This is according to a new report from Google, which highlights the growing concern of commercially developed spyware.

Now, according to Google’s latest Buying Spying report, it tracks around 40 Commercial Surveillance Vendors (CSV). Some are more popular than others, but all play an important role in developing spyware, it said. more

Google: "If governments ever claimed to have a monopoly on the most advanced cyber capabilities, that era is over. The private sector is now responsible for a significant portion of the most sophisticated tools we detect."

Cyber Security: Ready or Not – You Decide

Critical infrastructure isn't ready yet to face China's cyber threat
If China-backed hackers were to take down U.S. critical infrastructure and hit a pipeline or water utility, officials have long said that would be considered an act of war.
https://www.axios.com/2024/02/02/china-hacking-threat-government-warning

U.S. Can Respond Decisively to Cyber Threat Posed by China

"And in terms of the way that we communicate it, we communicate it in many different ways—from our policymakers who have these discussions to the exercises that we conduct to the real-world examples that, that we do with a series of different partners." 
https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3663799/us-can-respond-decisively-to-cyber-threat-posed-by-china/

The ToothBots Are Coming

According to a recent report published by the Aargauer Zeitung (h/t Golem.de), around three million smart toothbrushes have been infected by hackers and enslaved into botnets...

In this particular case, the toothbrush botnet was thought to have been vulnerable due to its Java-based OS. No particular toothbrush brand was mentioned in the source report. Normally, the toothbrushes would have used their connectivity for tracking and improving user oral hygiene habits, but after a malware infection, these toothbrushes were press-ganged into a botnet. more

UPDATE: Okay, stop laughing. The report of a massive denial of service attack by smart toothbrushes was a misreported story from mainstream sources. A hypothetical that was mistranslated.

“The Conversation” to be Remade as a TV Series

Francis Ford Coppola‘s 1974 masterpiece “The Conversation” will be remade as a TV series, with “Margin Call” and “All Is Lost” filmmaker J.C. Chandor attached to both write and direct the series, IndieWire has confirmed.

Chandor will direct via his CounterNarrative Films banner alongside Temple Hill, producer Adam Fishbach, and executive produced by Coppola’s American Zoetrope. Erin Levy, known for her work on “Mad Men” and “Mindhunter,” will be the showrunner on “The Conversation” remake. 

MRC is the studio behind the series, and the company optioned the TV remake rights directly from the Coppola estate. more

...and for old times' sake...

FutureWatch: New Wi-Fi Tech Has Potential Spy Applications

Morse Micro, announced the first live demonstration of Wi-Fi CERTIFIED HaLow technology extending 3 km (nearly two miles). Morse Micro staged this record-setting field test of a long-range video call in San Francisco’s Ocean Beach neighborhood to showcase the ability of sub-GHz Wi-Fi HaLow signals to reach long distances in challenging real-world conditions. A low-power, long-reach version of Wi-Fi based on the IEEE 802.11ah standard, Wi-Fi HaLow offers more than 10x the range, 100x the coverage area and 1000x the volume of traditional Wi-Fi technologies...

Wi-Fi HaLow overcomes the limitations of traditional Wi-Fi by operating in the sub-GHz spectrum on narrow frequency bands, enabling the technology to penetrate obstacles and provide unmatched performance, even in noisy environments crowded with numerous connected devices and cameras. Wi-Fi HaLow not only increases wireless range; it also extends battery life with its power-saving features...

The company is sampling its Wi-Fi Alliance and FCC-certified MM6108 production silicon – the fastest, smallest, lowest power and longest-range Wi-Fi HaLow SoC available in the market. more

Crime: Cameras Hidden in a Church Bathroom

UPDATE: U.S. District Judge Sarah E. Pitlyk on Thursday sentenced a man who hid a video camera in a bathroom to capture images of a young girl to 25 years in prison. more

-----

U.S. Attorney Trini E. Ross announced today that Stephen Nicot, 61, of Rochester, NY, pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Frank P. Geraci, Jr. to receipt of child pornography...

Assistant U.S. Attorney Meghan K. McGuire, who is handling the case, stated that between 2012 and 2014, Nicot hid a camera in the bathroom of a church located in the Western District of New York. 

Nicot positioned the camera so that it would capture video and images of naked individuals using the shower in the church bathroom. He did this knowing some of the individuals would be under the age of 18 and he planned to display the video of the minors. 

...law enforcement executed a warrant at the Nicot’s residence and recovered a memory card and USB drive, which contained videos and images of at least five minor victims using the church bathroom and shower. Two cell phones were also seized, which contained naked images of a minor victim that were recorded by a camera hidden in a bathroom of Nicot’s residence. more

Don't let you or your children become victims. 

Know how to spot hidden spy cameras. 

Take the course.

So Much Data Even Spies Are Struggling to Find Secrets

Spying used to be all about secrets. Increasingly, it’s about what’s hiding in plain sight.

A staggering amount of data, from Facebook posts and YouTube clips to location pings from mobile phones and car apps, sits in the open internet, available to anyone who looks. US intelligence agencies have struggled for years to tap into such data, which they refer to as open-source intelligence, or OSINT. But that’s starting to change.

In October the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees all the nation’s intelligence agencies, brought in longtime analyst and cyber expert Jason Barrett to help with the US intelligence community’s approach to OSINT. His immediate task will be to help develop the intelligence community’s national OSINT strategy, which will focus on coordination, data acquisition and the development of tools to improve its approach to this type of intelligence work. ODNI expects to implement the plan in the coming months, according to a spokesperson. more

US spies want to use AI

The U.S. government is considering incorporating more artificial intelligence into its spying operations — but first it has to figure out which AI models can resist tampering and protect the country’s secrets...

“The intelligence community wants to avail itself of the large-language models out there, but there are a lot of unknowns,” Tim McKinnon, who runs IARPA’s Bias Effects and Notable Generative AI Limitations (BENGAL) project, told Bloomberg. “The end goal is being able to work with a model with trust.”...

The BENGAL team tests different ways to attack AI models and uncover vulnerabilities that could hamper their effective use by U.S. spies. Officials have also invited private companies to perform these tests for the government. more

"There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven't yet met." - TSA

The Transportation Security Administration is planning to expand its facial recognition scanners to more than 400 airports, an agency official said...

The CAT-2 units are currently deployed at nearly 30 airports nationwide, and will expand to more than 400 federalized airports over the coming years,” the TSA official said...

During a discussion at the South by Southwest festival in March 2023, TSA Administrator David Pekoske said “eventually we will get to the point where we will require biometrics across the board because it is much more effective and much more efficient.” more

World's Smallest Video Camera (2024)

They just keep getting smaller and smaller...

1/11" CMOS mini medical design camera to capture 1 megapixel in a compact 1.43 x 0.81 mm package. These features make it ideal for many endoscopic devices, including those used in airway management ; gastrointestinal ; and urology applications. more