The sight of a drone in flight is likely to become a regular occurrence in the United States within the next few years. But the rise of unmanned technology could lead to new crimes like “drone stalking” and “drone trespassing,” lawmakers are being told.
A Congressional Research Service report published Wednesday, Integration of Drones Into Domestic Airspace: Selected Legal Issues, sets out the many contentious areas around unmanned aircraft. It cautions that in the future, as drones become more easily available to private citizens, we may see the technology used to commit various offenses. This could mean neighbors using drones to infiltrate one another’s gardens as a means of harassment, or a voyeur using one strapped with a camera and microphone to photograph women and listen in on people’s conversations.
“Traditional crimes such as stalking, harassment, voyeurism, and wiretapping may all be committed through the operation of a drone,” the report says. “As drones are further introduced into the national airspace, courts will have to work this new form of technology into their jurisprudence, and legislatures might amend these various statutes to expressly include crimes committed with a drone.”
Of particular note is a section in the report titled “Right To Protect Property From Trespassing Drones.” It outlines that in certain instances, under a section of tort law, “a landowner would not be liable to the owner of a drone for damage necessarily or accidentally resulting from removing it from his property.” This doesn’t necessarily mean that you can “use force”—like shooting the thing down—if someone flies an unmanned aircraft onto your property. But it does mean you could remove a drone from your property without resorting to force, and if it were “accidentally” damaged in that process, you might not be in trouble. (more)
Unlike other miniature scanners, the NoteMark is equipped with a 5-megapixel sensor with an auto-focus lens that can capture an image instantly. Twisting the top of the pen readies the sensor, while a button on the side activates the shutter.
The sensor is capable of digitizing just about any information put in front of it, from a small blurb in a magazine to an entire whiteboard of notes. Each picture is captured as a sharp 2048 x 1536-resolution JPEG and stored in the pen's 1GB of flash memory, which can hold up to 1,000 images. The pen also features a microphone and can record up to 1,000 one-minute voice clips in WAV format.
It takes one hour to fully charge the scanner through USB, which gives it enough power to take about 300 images. Once the images or audio clips are saved, you can access them by plugging the NoteMark into any Mac or PC and even sync them across computers and mobile devices using software from Evernote.
It's a fairly simple device, but one that could no doubt save a lot of time and hassle for both office workers and James Bond alike. ($124.95) (more)
Sophos Free Encryption reviewed by Matthew Nawrocki Product Information: Title: Sophos Free Encryption Company: Sophos Ltd. Product URL: http://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools/sophos-free-encryption.aspx Supported OS: Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7 and 8 Price: Free Rating: 5 out of 5 Bottom Line: Sophos delivers an excellent freeware utility for securing document files with sensitive data inside AES encrypted archives. The software is easy to use and offers nice features to boot.
Sophos Free Encryption is a tool that works like a zip program, but with the added aforementioned encryption, which is AES-256-bit for good measure. Digging a bit into this product, I noticed a few niceties that the competition doesn’t really have in the security department, namely in how it handles passwords and the self-extracting archive feature. For a free tool, this beats its competitor SecureZIP by PKWare, which actually costs money to do the same thing. (more)
About this time last year I reported on hacking Internet-connected video security cameras. Now, let's watch another aspect of the problem, personal webcam spying...
Depending upon how old you are, you will recognize this is a reoccurring theme in works of fiction...
1998 - The Truman Show The film chronicles the life of a man who is initially unaware that he is living in a constructed reality television show, broadcast around the clock to billions of people across the globe.
1964 - Wendy and Me George Burns as landlord would watch his attractive young tenant on what
appears to the modern eye to be a surreptitious closed circuit
television transmission with hidden cameras (he also accomplished this
with his "TV in the den" in later episodes of The Burns and Allen Show).
1949 - 1984 George Orwell predicts a populace kept under constant surveillance by closed-circuit security cameras that transmit footage back to Big Brother.
A persistent headache for IT administrators dealing with BYOD in the workplace is how to keep sensitive company data safe even as more and more employee-owned devices are allowed into the corporate network.
Prey, an open source, cross-platform anti-theft tracker that lets you keep track of all your devices easily in one place. Whatever your device, chances are Prey has you covered as there are installers available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Ubuntu, Android, and iOS.
Prey is easy to use. First off, you download and install the right version for your hardware. Then, after you've created an account and got it set up the way you want, you can forget about it until the day that your device is lost or stolen.
As soon as you discover that your hardware has been lost or stolen, you can activate prey by logging into your account and select the device 'missing-in-action'. Then, Prey's servers send a signal to the device -- either over the Web or with a text message -- that kicks Prey into action, gathering information such as location, hardware details and network status information. You can also capture screen shots, take pictures with the forward-facing camera, and even lock the system down to prevent further intrusion.
Prey offers a free, unlimited, 3-device account for anyone wanting to give the software a try. There are also premium account options that increase the device limit and add features such as automated deployment and full SSL encryption of all gathered data.
Putting a mechanism in place for recovering your lost or stolen hardware before the worst happens gives you a fighting chance of being able to find your hardware, or at worst, keep your data away from prying eyes. (more) Note: My testing revealed one possible glitch. If your device does not have GPS capability (laptop, for example), the location being reported may belong to a service provider's IP address. In my case, the local phone company's DSL lines terminate in a town about 30 miles away. Otherwise, the system works great. No reason not to have this capability. ~Kevin
On Jan. 25, 1915, the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, inaugurated U.S. transcontinental telephone service. (more) By this time wiretapping was already over 50 years old. ~Kevin
Japanese philanderers know their weak spot: the smartphone.
Afraid that girlfriends and wives will spot incoming calls from certain secret someones, Lotharios in Japan are sticking with Fujitsu's old "F-Series" flip phones, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The so-called "infidelity phones" can easily be programmed to conceal calls and texts from particular contacts.
Fujitsu has added similar privacy features to its new lineup. Like the F-Series, these phones signal users with little changes of the antenna or battery mark. Only problem: they require a separate app.
US entrepreneur Neal Desai has designed a similar app called Call and Text Eraser that's been downloaded more than 10,000 times—but he cooed when told about the F-Series: "That's more genius than my app," he said. (more)
Trees in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest are being fitted with mobile phones in an attempt to tackle illegal logging and deforestation.
Devices smaller than a pack of cards are being attached to the trees in protected areas to alert officials once they are cut down and the logs are transported.
Location data is sent from sensors once the logs are within 20 miles of a mobile phone network to allow Brazil’s environment agency to stop the sale of illegal timber. The technology, called Invisible Tracck, which is being piloted by Dutch digital security company Gemalto, has a battery life of up to a year and has been designed to withstand the Amazonian climate. (more)
First the researchers noted that even when there's silence in a Skype call, the software is still generating and sending packets of audio data. After analyzing Skype calls, they found that they could reliably identify those silence packets, because they were only about half the size of packets containing voices. SkyDe (for Skype Hide) encrypts your hidden message, grabs a certain portion of outgoing silence packets, and stuffs the encrypted message into them. (more) Important point: Conventional steganography hides data within photos and pictures. Downside... Your hidden message may languish on servers in multiple places for a long time, where it could eventually be discovered. Sky-De reduces this vulnerability. ~Kevin
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or "drones") are fast becoming an ever-present eye in the sky, potentially granting governments greater strike and surveillance capabilities than even Orwell’s fictional Big Brother could hope to wield. In response, NYC artist Adam Harvey has created a series of garments which claim to reduce the effectiveness of UAVs.
Harvey’s garments include an anti-drone hoodie and scarf, which are designed to block the thermal imaging cameras used by many airborne drones. The designer also created a burqa which appears to function in much the same way.
Click to enlarge
Harvey is currently selling the designs, and would-be shoppers can pick up an anti-drone hoodie for £315 (or around US$500). The Stealth Wear collection is on display in the UK at Primitive London until January 31. (more)
Developed with Seiichi Gohshi of Kogakuin University, the visor has a near-infrared light source that messes up cameras but doesn't affect the wearer's vision, according to the institute.
They're hardly fashionable, but the lights create noise that prevents computer vision algorithms from extracting the features needed to recognize a face. (more) (get the t-shirt) (sing-a-long)
via one of our Blue Blazer irregulars... (thanks!) From Russian photoblog PhotoShtab.ru comes these great pictures of Cold War-era miniature gadgets that KGB spies and others used to monitor, smuggle, and kill (via RussiaEnglish).
Seeing as we have just seen the new adaptation of John Le Carre's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, these photos are a another great reminder of how paranoid and insane that whole 'Cold War' period was. (many more gadgets)
P.S. If you like seeing Cold War spy tools, your really need The Ultimate Spy Book, by historian H. Keith Melton. It is loaded with large glossy photos of the CIA's Greatest Hits, and the fascinating history of spies and their gadgets.
The Act enhances the penalties for certain violations of the Economic Espionage Act.
The purpose of the Act was to amend title 18, United States Code, to provide for increased penalties for foreign and economic espionage.
Under the Act, the upper limit of penalties for individual offenses of Section 1831(a) are increased from $500,000 to $5,000,000 and the upper limit for corporate offenses of Section 1831(b) are increased from $10,000,000 to the greater of $10,000,000 or 3 times the value of the stolen trade secret to the organization, including expenses for research and design and other costs of reproducing the trade secret that the organization has thereby avoided. (more) Why this approach alone has never worked, and what will work... "A Cunning Plan to Protect U.S. from Business Espionage"
Historian Helen Fry, who has written a book called The M Room: Secret Listeners who bugged the Nazis., says the information gleaned by the eavesdropping of the German generals was vitally important to the war effort - so much so that it was given an unlimited budget by the government.
Click to enlarge.
She believes what was learned by the M room operations was as significant as the code-breaking work being done at Bletchley Park.
"British intelligence got the most amazing stuff in bugging the conversations. Churchill said of Trent Park that it afforded a unique insight into the psyche of the enemy. It enabled us to understand the mind-set of the enemy as well as learn military secrets. "If it wasn't for this bugging operation, we may well have not won the war." (more)
A security audit of a US critical infrastructure company last year revealed that its star developer had outsourced his own job to a Chinese subcontractor and was spending all his work time playing around on the internet.
Verizon investigators found that he had hired a software consultancy in Shenyang to do his programming work for him, and had FedExed them his two-factor authentication token so they could log into his account. He was paying them a fifth of his six-figure salary to do the work and spent the rest of his time on other activities...
Further investigation found that the enterprising Bob had actually taken jobs with other firms and had outsourced that work too, netting him hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit as well as lots of time to hang around on internet messaging boards and checking for a new Detective Mittens video. (more)
Not a horse-fly, a real horse. My friend and colleague, Tim Johnson, relates the tail tale...
"I was contacted to do a debugging sweep of a company executive area and an executive residence in a midwestern state. Having concluded the examination of the offices without finding anything I proceeded to the residence where I repeated the process.
During the radio frequency examination I detected a radio frequency that I noted for additional analysis. In doing a further examination of the signal it was determined to be originating from outside the residence. This was done by moving my receiver to different locations and checking the signal strength.
There was a barn located in the general direction of the signal path so I went out and did a further check." (more)
Vodaphone wondered too... In The Lost Phone Experiment, Vodaphone planted 100 phones throughout the Netherlands, and tracked their
fortunes via a web site.
They came up with some interesting data about
how many are returned, where they traveled to, what they were used for, and by
who. Open the site up using Chrome and hit "Translate" so you can read it in English. (more)
Spoiler Alert: About 30% were returned to their owners.
Critical control systems inside two US power generation facilities were found infected with computer malware, according to the US Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team.
AMD has filed (and been granted) a request for immediate injunctive relief against multiple former employees that it alleges stole thousands of confidential documents. Named in the complaint are Robert Feldstein, Manoo Desai, Nicholas Kociuk, and Richard Hagen. All four left AMD to work at Nvidia in the past year.
The loss of Feldstein was particularly noteworthy, as he’d been the head of AMD’s console initiatives for years. Feldstein was behind the work that landed AMD the Wii U, PS4, and Xbox Durango.
The AMD complaint states that “He [Feldstein] transferred sensitive AMD documents, and in the next six months, the three defendants either did the same thing...
AMD claims to have forensic evidence that three of the four defendants transferred more than 10,000 confidential files in total, with the names of the files in question matching “either identically or very closely to the names of files on their AMD systems that include obviously confidential, proprietary, and/or trade secret materials related to developing technology.” (more)
Almost 25 percent of Android apps feature code that can access application permissions and cause security vulnerabilities, according to a new study by mobile security firm TrustGo.
Of the 2.3m Android apps analysed by TrustGo in the fourth quarter of 2012, 511,000 were identified as high risk, defined as being able to make unauthorised payments, steal data or modify user settings.
Not all of the apps are universally available. For example, just 10 percent of apps in the US and Western Europe had a high risk for causing security issues. While China was reported to have the most high risk apps available for download. (more)
The FBI calls it a “sensitive investigative technique” that it wants to keep secret. But newly released documents that shed light on the bureau’s use of a controversial cellphone tracking technology called the “Stingray” have prompted fresh questions over the legality of the spy tool.
Functioning as a so-called “cell-site simulator,” the Stingray is a sophisticated portable surveillance device. The equipment is designed to send out a powerful signal that covertly dupes phones within a specific area into hopping onto a fake network.
The feds say they use them to target specific groups or individuals and help track the movements of suspects in real time, not to intercept communications. But by design Stingrays, sometimes called “IMSI catchers,” collaterally gather data from innocent bystanders’ phones and can interrupt phone users’ service—which critics say violates a federal communications law. The FBI has maintained that its legal footing here is firm. Now, though, internal documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a civil liberties group, reveal the bureau appears well aware its use of the snooping gear is in dubious territory...
It’s likely that in the months ahead, a few more interesting nuggets of information will emerge. The FBI has told EPIC that it holds a mammoth 25,000 pages of documents that relate to Stingray tools, about 6,000 of which are classified. The Feds have been drip-releasing the documents month by month, and so far there have been four batches containing between 27 and 184 pages each. Though most of the contents—even paragraphs showing how the FBI is interpreting the law—have been heavy-handedly redacted, several eyebrow-raising details have made it through the cut. (more) (Stingray explained)
2009 - A simple experiment showing how to intercept computer keyboard emissions.
It is notable that there is: • no connection to the Internet; • no connection to power lines (battery operation); • no computer screen in use (eliminates the screen emissions possibility); • and no wireless keyboard or mouse. Intercepted emissions are solely from the hard-wired keyboard.
The interception antenna is located about one meter away. (This is why we look for antenna wires under desks, and metal parts on desks to which wiring is attached.) (video1) (video 2)
The point is, if one can get an antenna withing close proximity of your computer, what you type belongs to them. December 2012 - Not satisfied with pulling information from your keyboard, injecting information becomes a concern (pay attention investment firms).
"The roughly half-dozen objectives of the Tactical Electromagnetic Cyber Warfare Demonstrator program are classified, but the source said the program is designed to demonstrate ready-made boxes that can perform a variety of tasks, including inserting and extracting data from sealed, wired networks.
Being able to jump the gap provides all kinds of opportunities, since an operator (spy) doesn’t need to compromise the physical security of a facility to reach networks not connected to the Internet. Proximity remains an issue, experts said, but if a vehicle can be brought within range of a network, both insertion and eavesdropping are possible." (more) 2013 is going to be an interesting year. ~Kevin
