A coalition of activists, privacy organizations, journalists, and others have called upon Microsoft to be more forthright about when, why, and to whom it discloses information about Skype users and their communications.
In an open letter published on Thursday, the group argues that Redmond's statements about the confidentiality of Skype conversations have been "persistently unclear and confusing," casting the security and privacy of the Skype platform in doubt... The group claims that both Microsoft and Skype have refused to answer questions about what kinds of user data the service retains, whether it discloses such data to governments, and whether Skype conversations can be intercepted. (more) "more forthright" "in doubt" Please. The original Skype-in-the-wild was viewed as high security privacy tool. Guess who didn't like that. Guess why Skype was "bought" in from the wild and given adult supervision. (Think Spypke.) Post de facto petitioning is painful to watch. If you want privacy, you need to start much earlier in the game. It begins with self-reliance. Example: You don't see smart corporations sitting around waiting for 'the government' or some free software to protect their information. No, they take proactive measures like TSCM and IT security. They don't wait and whine later.
Alaska’s largest statewide commercial fishing trade association announced (it will) request Alaska authorities to investigate what they say was unauthorized eavesdropping of their United Fishermen of Alaska private teleconference by the Kenai River Sportfishing Association's office.
According to UFA Interim President Bruce Wallace, on January 17, 2013 the United Fishermen of Alaska, representing 34 member organizations, held a private teleconference.
In addition to 25 UFA Board members, UFA alleges an individual or individuals at the offices of the Kenai River Sportfishing Association (KRSA) was also on the line during the private teleconference.
This allegation was later confirmed by the teleconference vendor, who provided a phone log, which included a phone number registered to the Kenai River Sportfishing Association (KRSA) office. KRSA is not affiliated with UFA in any way. (more) (REAL Spy Fishing)
A reminder to our clients, and a free sample for potential clients...
Murray's Teleconferencing Checklist Passcodes... • Change all current passcodes, now. • Prohibit employees from mass e-mailing or posting passcodes. Switch to a conference call system with accountability features... • each participant is given a unique passcode, • the passcode is changed for each new conference call, • only the pre-authorized number of callers may be admitted, • and a record of all call participants is available to the call leader.
Russia - Reviving the Soviet cult of vigilance in the digital age, the administration of Russia’s second biggest city launched a tender to teach its officials the basics of combating technological espionage.
A hand-picked cadre of 25 civilian bureaucrats in St. Petersburg will train in ways of “countering foreign technical intelligence services and technical data protection,” according to the tender’s description... The course would last for 108 hours and end in a test. The tender has a price tag of 727,000 rubles ($24,000)... In December, the administration of St. Petersburg – headed by Governor Gennady Poltavchenko, also a former KGB officer – also contracted anti-espionage companies to look for covert listening devices in its offices, Fontanka.ru city news website reported. (more) The ROI on this should be tremendous. Every organization should be so smart. ~Kevin
The United States Intelligence Community (IC) invites you to attend the fourth annual IC Virtual Career Fair - a free online event - on Tuesday, February 26, 2013, from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. (Eastern).
Space is limited. To guarantee entrance, pre-registration is highly encouraged. Reserve your spot today!
Don't miss this opportunity to learn about IC careers and get tips on how to apply for positions.
According to TV station NHK, 30 year-old Yusuke Katayama was picked up after Tokyo police accessed CCTV pictures that showed the accused near the animal not long before the memory card was retrieved from its collar.
It later emerged that police had attempted to coerce confessions from four of the innocent suspects which led to a hugely embarrassing climbdown when they were shown to be uninvolved.
A Las Vegas limousine company executive was convicted Friday of hacking into the emails of his former employer.
John Sinagra, vice president and general manager of VIP Limousines of Nevada, was indicted last year on charges of obtaining information from a protected computer and aggravated identity theft.
Federal prosecutors alleged that Sinagra, who once was charged as a mob hitman in a sensational New York murder case, hacked into the emails of rival Las Vegas Limousines, owned by Frias Transportation, and stole key information. (more) (The Mechanic)
On Dec. 26, a grand jury handed down several indictments against the owners of the Columbia Packing Company for dumping pig blood into a creek. They now face hefty fines and even prison time stemming from the water pollution, and the plant has since been shuttered.
Neighbors had complained about noxious fumes and other issues for a while, according to the local news. But investigators didn’t get involved until this drone pilot took his pictures.
Under a new law proposed in the Texas legislature, sponsored by a lawmaker from the Dallas suburbs, this type of activity could soon be criminal. Not the pollution--the drone. (more)
And from down under...
One Tasmanian man is using a drone to help take video in tricky places and some of the video has gone viral. (video)
GLOBE reveals that the royal couple’s new home, Kensington Palace, is bugged, and it seems that Camilla Parker-Bowles is the prime suspect for bugger.
According to the cover of GLOBE’s current edition, February 18, two listening devices were discovered right inside the couple’s apartments. In this royal bombshell GLOBE will explain exactly how and where the royal bugs were discovered and why suspicion naturally fell on evil Camilla.
She was so concerned about eavesdropping that she called in a four-man team to carry out a search for listening devices.
The check was ordered in May 1993 after the princess expressed fears that her conversations were being monitored... But it went disastrously wrong when police detained the security firm's workers, who had arrived at the palace posing as carpet-fitters...
She had her butler Paul Burrell and his colleague Harold Brown - later both cleared of stealing from her after her death - arrange for the de-buggers to access the palace without the police knowing.
They gained access to the palace by claiming to be from a carpet firm. The secret mission was only discovered-when one of the team went to the palace gate house and asked for access to mainframe telephone equipment located in the engineers' room next to the police gate house.
Officers became suspicious and realised that the team from Moran Security Support Services Ltd had been contracted to "de-bug" the royal apartment. (more)
According to the report*, many staff members worry there are bugs in city hall that an exterminator cannot remove.
So much so, that one of the official recommendations is to sweep city hall.
"The Council should retain an outside firm to conduct a sweep of City Hall for bugs or other surveillance or electronic devices," the report reads. "While it is doubtful that any such devices exist in City Hall, there is a clear and present perception among staff that the facility is not secure and possibly bugged. Many employees in the City have resorted to the use of their personal cell phones and often leave the premises to discuss sensitive matters. A sweep of City facilities would help restore confidence in the security and privacy of the City buildings."
The findings of fact revealed that "based on credible and objective evidence, Police Chief Debra Duncan secretly tape recorded former City Manager Wayne Herron." (more) * The rest of the story... "the report" aka "The Fox Report" - "Attorney Anthony Fox led the team of two attorneys, Sarah Hutchins and
Mary Crosby. They interviewed about 24 people, including current and
former employees." "The report cost $50,000."
A sweep of the sensitive City Hall areas would have cost less than 1/4 of that. ~Kevin
For the past few months, some of the world’s leading cryptographers have been keeping a closely guarded secret about a pioneering new invention. Today, they’ve decided it’s time to tell all.
Back in October, the startup tech firm Silent Circle ruffled governments’ feathers with a “surveillance-proof” smartphone app to allow people to make secure phone calls and send texts easily. Now, the company is pushing things even further—with a groundbreaking encrypted data transfer app that will enable people to send files securely from a smartphone or tablet at the touch of a button. (For now, it’s just being released for iPhones and iPads, though Android versions should come soon.) That means photographs, videos, spreadsheets, you name it—sent scrambled from one person to another in a matter of seconds.
Click to enlarge.
“This has never been done before,” boasts Mike Janke, Silent Circle’s CEO. “It’s going to revolutionize the ease of privacy and security.”
The sender of the file can set it on a timer so that it will
automatically “burn”—deleting it from both devices after a set period
of, say, seven minutes. Until now, sending encrypted documents has been
frustratingly difficult for anyone who isn’t a sophisticated technology
user, requiring knowledge of how to use and install various kinds of
specialist software.
What Silent Circle has done is to remove these
hurdles, essentially democratizing encryption. It’s a game-changer that
will almost certainly make life easier and safer for journalists,
dissidents, diplomats, and companies trying to evade state surveillance
or corporate espionage. Governments pushing for more snooping powers, however, will not be pleased. (more)
The U.K. plans to install an unspecified number of spy devices along the country’s telecommunications network to monitor Britons’ use of overseas services such as Facebook and Twitter, according to a report published Tuesday by Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee.
The devices — referred to as “probes” in the report — are meant to underpin a nationwide surveillance regime aimed at logging nearly everything Britons do online, from Skype calls with family members to visits to pornographic websites. The government argues that swift access to communications data is critical to the fight against terrorism and other high-level crime.
Authorities have been at pains to stress that they’re not seeking unfettered access to the content of emails or recordings of phone calls, but rather what many have described as “outside of the envelope” information: Who sends a message, where and how it is sent, and who receives it. (more) ...for now.
MO - A Chinese business owner and one of his employees have pleaded guilty in Missouri to conspiring to steal trade secrets from a U.S. company, in what one expert called a rare example of foreign business people being successfully prosecuted for corporate spying.
Ji Li Huang, 45, and Xiao Guang Qi, 32, admitted Friday, Jan 25 in federal court that they tried to buy Pittsburgh Corning Corp.’s proprietary formula for cellular glass insulation by bribing an employee of the company’s Sedalia plant.
U.S. District Judge Brian Wimes sentenced Huang to 18 months in federal prison and fined him $250,000. Qi — Huang’s employee at a plastic novelties manufacturer called Ningbo Oriental Crafts Ltd. — was sentenced to time served and fined $20,000, with the understanding that he would leave the United States immediately. Both men paid their fines Friday, The Kansas City Star reported. (more)
The British army has demonstrated a new tiny spy drone as the latest weapon against Taliban militants in Afghanistan.
Soldiers from the Brigade Reconnaissance Force at Camp Bastion demonstrated the eight-inch long plastic moulded drone, which has three cameras hidden inside its nose and weighs just 15 grams.
Codenamed the Black Hornet, the tiny aircraft is being used by British troops against the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The small flying machine, which has a smooth grey body and twin black rotors, can either be controlled directly or programmed to fly to a given set of co-ordinates and then return to base after carrying out its spy missions. (more)
The apps cloaks as cache cleaners but instead snoop around once connected to PC. Superclean and DroidCleaner are the two applications uncovered by Kaspersky Labs. Both feature clean-up of Android phone or tablet cache files.
The so-called "cleaners" promise to make devices faster and to increase processing but turns out to download three separate files - autorun.inf, folder.ico, and svchosts.exe. These components are automatically placed in the root of the device's SD card, and once the user connects it to the computer using USB mode, the malware begins to execute itself.
The malware activates the desktop microphone, encrypts all recording, and send all gathered information back to the developer of the malicious application according to Kaspersky. Aside from infecting the PC, the malware also uploads Android device's information, opens arbitrary browser links, uploads and deletes SMS, and distributes contacts, photos, and coordinates online. (more)
Kiriakou, 48, declined to make a statement at the Alexandria, Virginia, federal court prior to sentencing by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema. "Alright, perhaps you've already said too much," Brinkema said. (more)
These unmanned flying robots–some as large as jumbo jets, others as small as birds–do things straight out of science fiction. Much of what it takes to get these robotic airplanes to fly, sense, and kill has remained secret. But now, with rare access to drone engineers and those who fly them for the U.S. military, NOVA reveals the amazing technologies that make drones so powerful as we see how a remotely-piloted drone strike looks and feels from inside the command center. From cameras that can capture every detail of an entire city at a glance to swarming robots that can make decisions on their own to giant air frames that can stay aloft for days on end, drones are changing our relationship to war, surveillance, and each other. And it's just the beginning. Discover the cutting edge technologies that are propelling us toward a new chapter in aviation history as NOVA gets ready for "Rise of the Drones." Sneak preview...
UK - A 52-YEAR-OLD man was arrested yesterday in Oxfordshire on suspicion of business espionage. The Metropolitan Police Service made the arrest as part of Operation Tuleta, an investigation into criminal breaches of privacy... The arrest, the 20th in Operation Tuleta, is part of the Kalmyk investigative strand of inquiry relating to computer hacking offenses. (more)
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)
