Letterlocking: How Secrets Were Kept Before Gummed Envelopes

Mary, Queen of Scots used a "spiral locking" technique to seal the last letter she wrote before her execution, indicating that she wanted the contents to remain secret, according to research published in the Electronic British Library Journal.

An example of letterlocking -- where people doubled letters as envelopes to ensure the security of a document -- the fallen monarch used a spiral locking process to seal a message that was "a last will and testament and a bid for martyrdom," the research published on Friday says.

Letterlocking was used widely throughout early modern Europe, and was an essential process of ensuring the security of letters before mass-produced gummed envelopes were manufactured in the 19th-century

It played a crucial role in the "history of secrecy systems," enabling "global correspondence in the early modern period as fundamentally as computer coding underpins digital communication today," the research paper says. more

Recent Hot Mic News...

Eavesdropping Bugs and Hot Mics have something in common... both capture private conversations not for publication. Technical Surveillance Countermeasures  (TSCM) inspections can combat the bugging. Hot Mic avoidance is more a do-it-yourself exercise. It requires you listen to your mom's advice, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it."

Judge Ridicules Attorney After Hearing
IL - A Cook County judge this week was caught on a YouTube livestream mocking an attorney who had appeared before him for arguments earlier in the day.

“Can you imagine waking up next to her every day? Oh, my God,” Judge William Raines said of attorney Jennifer Bonjean. “... I couldn’t have a visual on that if you paid me.”

A link to the video of Tuesday’s livestreamed court call was available for viewing as recently as Thursday morning. After Raines had finished hearing cases, he began to chat with two Cook County prosecutors and a Cook County assistant public defender about the legal argument Bonjean had participated in earlier that day. He apparently did not realize the conversation was still being broadcast live on YouTube.

“I’m reliving (Assistant State’s Attorney) Todd Dombrowski’s conversation with Miss Bonjean,” he said, apparently unprompted. “... Did you see her going nuts? Glasses off, fingers through her hair, the phone’s going all over the place, it’s insane.” more

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Secret Audio Sheds Light on Toppled Dictator’s Frantic Last Hours
Tunisia - The recordings - obtained by BBC News Arabic Documentaries - have been forensically analysed by audio experts who found no evidence of tampering or manipulation...

"When we see that you can come back, we'll let you know, Mr President," Ammar tells Ben Ali...

"There's anger on the streets in a way that I cannot describe," Grira says. He seems keen to be clear with the president, adding: "So that you cannot say that I misled you, and the decision is yours."

Ben Ali tries to defend his reputation. "What have I done to the street? I served it."

"I'm giving you the situation, not an explanation" Grira replies. more

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WHOU broadcasters fired after hot mic catches -shaming of girls basketball players...

ME - The broadcasters, who didn’t realize their microphones were on, made the derogatory remarks about players in a girls’ game between Central Aroostook and Easton that they were watching on a monitor while they prepared for their game at Caribou.

In a 40-second video posted to Twitter, the two are heard making derogatory comments about the weight of some players. One of the broadcasters was heard to say, “two girls out here extremely overweight. Awful.” Other derogatory comments were followed by laughter.

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Hot Mic Revenge - The FAUCI Act
DC - After Dr. Anthony Fauci was caught on a hot mic calling Senator Roger Marshall a moron, Marshall publicized his financial records and announced the impending introduction of the FAUCI Act. more

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Rebecca Maddern's Explosive Leaked Rant About Novak Djokovic
Australia - In a moment that is surely every live TV host's worst nightmare, Rebecca Maddern was caught this week branding unvaccinated tennis champion Novak Djokovic a 'lying, sneaky a***hole' in leaked footage that was never supposed to air. more

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Hot Mic at Anchorage Community Council Zoom Meeting
AK - Two members of Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson’s administration attended a community council meeting this week over Zoom to talk about COVID-19 testing and other issues... The two inadvertently left their microphone on during the meeting while speaking to each other, and at one point, Bronson’s director of legislative affairs said he thought someone they had been talking with “needed a little slapping around.” more

 

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Dr. Oz's Hot Mic Moment
A hot mic moment captured Dr. Mehmet Oz seemingly trying to distance himself from the Republican Party despite his Senate run as a GOP candidate.

In a new profile by New York magazine's Olivia Nuzzi, Oz and his wife, Lisa, were overheard discussing Nuzzi as well as a friend of the couple who spoke to Nuzzi about the doctor's recent announcement that he was running in Pennsylvania for the U.S. Senate.

In the story, Nuzzi described a call with Lisa Oz, during which the latter thought she had hung up but had left the reporter on the line as she and her husband "engaged in paranoid conversation and argument for more than four minutes" while Nuzzi listened. more

 

History: Beverly Hills Spy

How a WWII-Era James Bond Betrayed the Allies

To his glamorous friends in Hollywood, Frederick Rutland was a dashing British war hero and a fixture of L.A. high society. To his Japanese handlers, he was Agent Shinkawa, an asset who provided critical intelligence in the lead-up to Pearl Harbor...

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

Ex-Monsanto Employee Pleads Guilty to Corporate Spying

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 Justice Department has said that Xiang had applied for and was ultimately recruited into a Chinese government program that seeks to enlist Chinese academics and scientists working abroad to illegally transfer technology and intellectual property to Beijing. more

iPhone Malware Tactic Causes Fake Shutdowns: Enables Spying

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.

In the world of mobile malware, simply shutting down a device can often wipe out any bad code, given that persistence after rebooting is a challenge for traditional malicious activity. But a new iPhone technique can hijack and prevent any shut-down process that a user initiates, simulating a real power-off while allowing malware to remain active in the background.

The stealthy technique, dubbed “NoReboot” by researchers, is “the ultimate persistence bug,” according to a ZecOps analysis this week... 

Is There a Patch for NoReboot?

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

'Leaked' Chinese Spy-Spoof Mocking US Draws Response From MI6

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

From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave Us...

"Gloworm" Eavesdropping and Air-Gaped Computer Hacks

After a long day at work, the modern goldfish no longer has to take public transportation home—it can drive via a fish-operated vehicle (FOV), according to new research published in Behavioural Brain Research.

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.) 

The Chatter Phone Eavesdropping Bug, or Santa's Latest Spy Trick

Ken Munro, founder of the cybersecurity company Pen Test Partners, told TechCrunch that chief among the concerns are that the Chatter does not have a secure pairing process to stop unauthorized phones in Bluetooth range from connecting to it...

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

 

 

Khashoggi's Wife's Phone Bugged With Spyware Before Killing

The mobile phone of Hanan Elatr, the wife of Saudi dissident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi was reportedly bugged by United Arab Emirates agents.  

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

Coach Banned Over Spying Scandal

Australia - Capitals coach Paul Goriss has been banned after obtaining leaked training footage of the Sydney Uni Flames. video

Fake Italian Gynaecologist Snares 400 Women in Webcam Scam

Italian police Friday searched the house of suspected serial sexual predator believed to have posed as a gynaecologist to persuade dozens of women to undergo vaginal exams via weblink. more

Millions of Android Phones Vulnerable Over ‘Eavesdropping’ Scare

MILLIONS of people around the world have been exposed to snoopers by dodgy microchips loaded into Android smartphones.

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

 

Spy Trick # 712 - The Memory Card Ring (Make Your Own!)

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

A New "Mobile" Phone - Complete with No Apps

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...  

FutureWatch: Yet Another World's Smallest Camera

Micro-sized cameras have great potential to spot problems in the human body and enable sensing for super-small robots, but past approaches captured fuzzy, distorted images with limited fields of view.

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