TSCM Security Tip: Check Hotel Ownership

Many hotels, conference centers and resorts are controlled or owned by governments engaging in business espionage. Checking the ownership before booking your off-site meetings and general business travel can significantly reduce your risk of electronic surveillance.

Click for interactive map.

From a New York Times article, Foiling Cyberspies on Business Trips...
Evan Anderson, chief executive of Invnt/IP, a group dedicated to combating nation-sponsored intellectual property theft...said he created a map of Chinese-owned hotels around the world in 2016 and was surprised by how many they were, including some in Silicon Valley where technology companies hold meetings. “Most people don’t realize that an individual Four Seasons hotel, Ritz-Carlton, or many other brands can be owned by a Chinese company with close ties to the Chinese government,” he said.

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Checking venue ownership is the first step to reducing the risk of intellectual property theft. The second step is hiring a Technical Surveillance Countermeasures (TSCM) specialist. They will search for all types of electronic surveillance (i.e., audio bugging, video voyeurism, and data cybersecurity), before and during your stay.

Security directors from Fortune 1000 companies are invited to receive my free Off-Site Meeting Security Checklist — 25 recommendations / 5-page report. ~Kevin

Sports Espionage: Honduras Accuses Australia of Spying by Drone

Honduras accused Australia of spying on their training sessions with a drone on Monday, as tensions heated up ahead of Wednesday's decisive World Cup playoff match.

The Honduran National Football Federation (FENAFUTH) posed 18 seconds of footage of a drone flying above Sydney's Olympic Stadium, where the team trained on Monday after their long flight from central America.


"Australia spied on Honduras's official training session from a drone, causing discomfort among the Honduran team and delegation," FENAFUTH said on its Twitter feed. more

Industrial Espionage “can be done cheaply and at scale”

The admonitions to business travelers headed to other countries should be familiar by now: Keep your laptop with you at all times. Stay off public Wi-Fi networks. Don’t send unencrypted files over the internet...

“There’s a difficult intersection between convenience and security,” said Samantha Ravich, who studies cyber-enabled economic warfare at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on national security...

The problem of intellectual property theft is not new, but it is now much more widespread. “Placing listening devices in conference rooms, hotels and restaurants is traditional Espionage 101,” Ms. Ravich said. But with tools like tiny inexpensive cameras and microphones or compromised Wi-Fi networks, corporate or state-sponsored industrial espionage “can be done cheaply and at scale,” she said. more

How Pinkerton laid the foundation for the CIA and FBI

Allan Pinkerton, the grandaddy of American private eyes, has a “true detective” story made for the binge-watch era.

Pinkerton (left). Restored image. Click to enlarge.

The organized investigation of suspicious behaviors has evolved in two directions. One is in the case of detective work, dealing with activities that endanger individual citizens. The other, integrally linked avenue is in intelligence, investigating threats to the state.

Flowing out of the same font, the modern incarnation of these entwined investigative avenues are largely the creation of two people.

In Europe, Eugene-Francois Vidocq may be considered the godfather of the former criminal turned secret agent who is largely responsible for the development of the modern, entwined arts of intelligence-gathering and criminal investigation. But stateside, his parallel, no less influential, was Lincoln’s spy master during the Civil War, Allan Pinkerton.

Born to an impoverished family in Glasgow in 1819... more

Takeaway: Don't Spy on Your Girlfriend's Affair

MI - A 43-year-old man was shot Friday while spying on a woman as she had an affair on Detroit's west side, police said. The man was spying on the 28-year-old woman around 2:20 a.m. in the 12000 block of Winthrop Street when she got caught having an affair, according to officials.

Police said when the man tapped on the window, the woman opened the window and fired shots. The man was shot in the arm, police said. He drove himself about two miles to the 8500 block of Lauder Street, where he called police. more

Economic Espionage: Web of Brain Sucking Spiders

For Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone, USA, commanding general, U.S. Army Cyber Command, one important perspective “is that our adversaries are antagonists,” he said. “Their capabilities are ever increasing.”

At first it was exploitation of data, then disruption and after that destruction. Before it was attacks on networks or a series of networks, now it also is data and critical infrastructure and key resources.

"I think that we are starting to see the trailers [preview] of the future war," Gen. Nakasone warned. Actors that the United States has not thought of, non-nation states, anonymous, proxy adversaries, will have an impact as antagonists against countries, the general predicted. They are not only going after military networks, they are going after the economic might of that nation. “They are going after the key terrain that they know is fundamental to how a country operates.” more

Suspended Sentence for Swiss Spy Snooping

Rarely has a spy case attracted as much attention in Germany as that of Daniel M. The bungling double agent passed on troves of bank data to German tax officials while allegedly gathering info on them for the Swiss.

A German court has handed a suspended sentence of one year and 10 months to the former Zurich police detective for spying on the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia's (NRW) tax authority and some of its staff for nearly four years up to February 2015.

The regional court in Germany's financial capital, Frankfurt, also slapped a fine of €25,000 ($29,000) on the 54-year-old Swiss double agent. more

Former Governor Wanted Wife Arrested for Eavesdropping

AL - The former director of the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency (Spencer Collier) said former Governor Robert Bentley wanted to know why his wife, Dianne shouldn't be arrested after he discovered she had been secretly recording his conversations with the aide suspected of being his mistress.

Collier said, "Once I become confident that Ms. Dianne was responsible for recording him, I told him and ended the investigation.

He wanted to know why she couldn't be arrested for planting an eavesdropping device.

I explained that in my opinion, no [District Attorney] in AL or the [Attorney General] was willing to prosecute a wife for recording her spouse caught in the act of adultery... He became upset and stated that if she or anyone disseminated the information that he would demand that they be arrested." more

Eavesdropper: The coding mistake that may be in your phone.

A simple coding error made in hundreds of apps may have exposed as many as 180 million smartphone users to having their text messages and phone conversations intercepted by hackers, security researchers warned.

The warning comes from experts at the cybersecurity firm Appthority, who spotted an error plaguing as many as 685 mobile apps—including one used for secure communications by a federal law enforcement agency...

The issue, which has been dubbed Eavesdropper...

Eavesdropper is an especially troublesome problem for a number of reasons. First, most users are likely unaware of what API their mobile apps use to handle certain features like texts and calls so it is unlikely the average person would be able to spot if an app they are using is vulnerable. more

Attorney Suspended for 4 Years for Eavesdropping

The state Supreme Court has suspended a northern Indiana attorney for at least four years after finding that he eavesdropped on private conversations between homicide suspects and their attorneys when he was a deputy prosecutor.

The court's disciplinary commission recommended Robert Neary be disbarred. But the justices instead issued an order Monday prohibiting him from working as a lawyer for four years...

They found that when Neary was a LaPorte County deputy prosecutor, he committed attorney misconduct by listening to two homicide suspects' confidential attorney-client conversations in incidents in 2012 and 2014 involving an audio feed and a video recording made in a police interview room. more

End-to-End Encryption App for Business Customers

End-to-end encrypted messaging app Wire has introduced a version of its service for business customers...

Wire CEO Alan Duric told ZDNet that the company had 300 firms on the Teams pilot and that businesses were using the service for their top managers or M&A teams and issues like crisis communications.

Wire is also eyeing the Internet of Things, arguing that end-to-end encryption could be applied to messages to devices as well as chats with your colleagues.

"There is quite a bit of awareness that industrial espionage is not a myth and that they need to protect their data," he said. more

Video Voyeur Drones Grab Headlines – Business Espionage Drones Don't

A growing number of women in Port Lincoln, South Australia, have reported being woken at night by a drone spying on them in their homes.

One woman was sleeping alone on her remote hobby farm when she was woken up by an object banging into her window, only to realize it was a drone with a camera attached.

Another woman told the ABC of the anxiety and panic she now experiences at night due to a similar encounter, saying, “You’ll hear a noise and even if it’s not a drone you just get paranoid…

Two of the victims no longer shower at night for fear of the drone capturing them while naked.

In May this year, a Sydney woman reported having been spied on by a drone while she was getting out of the shower.

These disturbing instances reflect the growing problem of the law being ill-equipped to deal with fast-developing technology, such as drones and revenge porn — with women constituting the largest proportion of victims to cyber-crimes. more

Spybusters Tip #519 - Video voyeur drones are headline grabbers. Business espionage drones go unnoticed. 

If your office has a window, you have an information security vulnerability. One quick high resolution drone camera flyby and visible paperwork and whiteboard information is theirs. 

Close curtains, or angle blinds downward when you leave. No curtains? Develop the "clear desk" habit. Then, contact us to make sure the place isn't bugged.  ~Kevin

Private Eye Charged with Illegally Spying on Politicians

FL - ...It was only after all three politicians discovered mysterious GPS trackers under their vehicles and turned them over to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement that a criminal investigation began...Now, nearly a year after election day, the State Attorney’s Office has charged Victor Elbeze with illegal tracking after FDLE agents found his fingerprints on one of trackers...


Elbeze and his boss at the time, Steve Cohen, who owns the Hallandale Beach firm General Investigative Services, denied following any politicians...Cohen, a shadowy Russian national who recently changed his name from Stanislav Doudnik, refused to speak on camera and wouldn’t say who hired his firm, citing client confidentiality. But he said he never ordered Elbeze, who has left his employ, or anyone else to do anything illegal.   more

Spycam Found at Condo Building - Florida Legislators Targeted

FL - For at least three days in the final week of the 2017 legislative session, a covert surveillance camera recorded the comings and goings of legislators and lobbyists living on the sixth floor of the Tennyson condominium near the Capitol.

Click to enlarge.

Weeks later, in a dark parking lot of an Italian restaurant in Tallahassee, Sen. Jack Latvala of Clearwater, a Republican candidate for governor, was also being spied upon. Grainy photos show him standing and planting a kiss on the cheek, then the mouth, of a female lobbyist on the last night of the Legislature’s special session.

These weren’t routine smartphone photos captured for fun. They were the work of private investigators whose research has fueled an escalating barrage of rumors in the last week about sexual harassment in Tallahassee and infidelity among the state’s elected legislators.

Incoming Senate Democrat Leader Jeff Clemens of Lake Worth abruptly resigned Friday after admitting to an affair with a lobbyist. Politico Florida was the first to report on Tuesday that private investigators had documented at least four separate incidents involving Latvala dining with female lobbyists and that state law enforcement officers investigated the covert camera at the Tennyson. more

The Secret Shoe, or The Bonded Sole

(via maxim.com)
We're not suggesting that you infiltrate an enemy's ranks to take down a hostile foreign power, but if you ever want to dabble in some international espionage, have we got the shoe for you.

A dressy Derby Shoe made from fine deerskin may seem less critical than a working knowledge of close quarters combat or Russian. Still, "The Secret Shoe" from Oliver Sweeney is here to satisfy all your covert spy needs... and then some.

The luxury footwear provider teamed with VeryFirstTo.com to stash inside this unsuspecting-looking shoe two hidden compartments that can each hold three gadgets at a time.

Derby Shoe has provided 12 for you to pick from: the world's smallest phone, a tiny video camera, a mini Swiss army knife, a tracking device, a money capsule, "the world's most advanced contactless payment ring" and more.

There's also room for a house key.

Click to enlarge.

Another badass feature you'll make use of if you're ever zip-tied and about to be tossed off a helicopter (there's a chance) is the laces. They're made of Kevlar, which means they can double as a friction saw that's strong enough to cut through wood and plastic. more

If your organization isn't picking up the tab for this, you'll probably be interested in the selling price. $1307.50

Still interested?

That's $1307.50 
...per shoe. ~Kevin