Chinese Telecoms May Be Spying on Large Numbers of Foreign Customers

theatlantic.com
A U.S. Congressional probe is investigating whether China's state-linked firms, which built much of the communications infrastructure in several Asian countries, is using its access for snooping.

Two Chinese telecommunications giants are under scrutiny by a US congressional committee. The outcome of the probe could have revealing implications for Central Asian states, which have used these companies to modernize their telecom sectors.
US legislators have expressed concern that Huawei and ZTE act as front companies for the Chinese government, and represent a grave "cyber-security threat." The chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Michigan Republican Mike Rogers, asserted during a congressional hearing last October that China is engaged in the "brazen and wide-scale theft of intellectual property from foreign commercial competitors."
"Attributing this espionage isn't easy, but talk to any private sector cyber analyst, and they will tell you there is little doubt that this is a massive campaign being conducted by the Chinese government," he added.

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Traveling Light in a Time of Digital Thievery

Note: Having recently traveled to China, I can attest to Mr. Lieberthal's concerns....Do yourself (and your company) a favor, Just accept the fact that you "will" be collected against...and take Mr. Lieberthal's advice...very seriously.  JDL

nytimes.com

SAN FRANCISCO — When Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a China expert at the Brookings Institution, travels to that country, he follows a routine that seems straight from a spy film.
He leaves his cellphone and laptop at home and instead brings “loaner” devices, which he erases before he leaves the United States and wipes clean the minute he returns. In China, he disables Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, never lets his phone out of his sight and, in meetings, not only turns off his phone but also removes the battery, for fear his microphone could be turned on remotely. He connects to the Internet only through an encrypted, password-protected channel, and copies and pastes his password from a USB thumb drive. He never types in a password directly, because, he said, “the Chinese are very good at installing key-logging software on your laptop.”
What might have once sounded like the behavior of a paranoid is now standard operating procedure for officials at American government agencies, research groups and companies that do business in China and Russia — like Google, the State Department and the Internet security giant McAfee. Digital espionage in these countries, security experts say, is a real and growing threat — whether in pursuit of confidential government information or corporate trade secrets.


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Government Investigates Cellphone Wiretapping

theatlantic.com
As the government begins an investigation into Carrier IQ's cell phone-tracking software, memories of its own wiretapping scandal resurface


"Spy on unsuspecting Americans? That's our job," you can imagine federal officials indignantly declaring as they investigate cell-phone tracking by the mobile software company, Carrier IQ. The National Security Agency began secret, illegal surveillance of our phone calls and Internet activities in 2001, as we belatedly learned in 2005. Yes, 2005 is a long time ago these days, when yesterday seems like old news; but the NSA scandal deserves to be remembered, especially when the government presumes to be outraged by telecom spying.  

When it began spying on us after 9/11, the Bush Administration enlisted the assistance of telecoms willing to engage in illegal activities at its behest. (Former Qwuest CEO Joseph Nacchio later claimed that after he declined to cooperate with the surveillance program, in 2001, the government retaliated, denying the company lucrative contracts. In 2007, Nacchio was convicted of insider trading.) After the NSA program was exposed, complicit telecoms faced the risks of losing expensive civil suits. AT&T, in particular, was badly exposed, thanks to incriminating documents released by a whistleblower and a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But not surprisingly, Congress intervened. In 2007, it retroactivelyimmunized the companies for illegal activities authorized by the president. As the late, disgraced Richard Nixon explained, prematurely, "when the President does it, it's not illegal." Voting in favor of telecom immunity, then candidate and Senator Obama apparently agreed.


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U.S. Calls Out China and Russia for Cyber Espionage Costing Billions

foxnews

Hey, China and Russia, get off of our clouds.

That's the warning from a new U.S. national intelligence director's report to Congress released Thursday that states China and Russia are the biggest perpetrators of economic espionage through the Internet. 

The report, Foreign Spies Stealing U.S. Economic Secrets in Cyberspace, also warns that the efforts to calculate the cost of lost research and development is nearly impossible to calculate but could be costing up to $398 billion. As mobile devices proliferate, it's only going to get easier for spies to steal.

Analysts note that this is the first time the U.S. government report has so openly blamed countries that support cyber attacks and espionage at the national and state level.

"The computer networks of a broad array of U.S. government agencies, private companies,
universities, and other institutions -- all holding large volumes of sensitive economic information -- were targeted by cyber espionage; much of this activity appears to have originated in China," reads the report.

Drawing on data from 13 agencies, including the CIA and FBI, over the past two years, the report concludes that attacks against U.S. government networks and military contracts are on the rise. But one of the most worrying trends is the growing number of attacks on businesses that are smaller than the Fortune 500 companies.

Additionally, the report states that China's intelligence services -- as well as private companies and other entities -- are exploiting Chinese citizens or others with family ties in China who have "insider access to corporate networks to steal trade secrets using removable media devices or e-mail."

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Note: Worried about Cyber Espionage? Contact us, we can help. ~JDL

Spouse Spy’s on the case

scpr.org

Tailing a philandering mate used to be so messy, complicated – and expensive. Private detectives aren’t cheap, after all, and someone always seems to end up dead – at least in the movies. But nowadays, suspicious spouses don’t need to call on Philip Marlowe. You can shadow your significant other just by installing Spouse Spy, or one of many similar apps, onto his or her cell phone.

A simple download lets you track comings and goings, read text messages, ogle photos, even listen in on conversations – all in real time. And of course, it’s all on the Q-T. – these apps are designed to be undetectable. But are they legal? A bipartisan group of senators, led by Al Franken (D-Minnesota) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) has asked the Department of Justice to look into whether these so-called “stalking apps” violate any laws.

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Welcome to the World of Cyber-Terror Vulnerability

foxnews.com
Did you open your BlackBerry Wednesday or even Thursday morning and find – nothing? No new e-mails, or tweets. No new text messages. Just blackness and that familiar screen saver photo of your child, spouse or dog? Welcome to the world of cyber-terrorism vulnerability.

The mysterious, world-wide virus that crippled BlackBerrys this week and spread like the plague – more on that threat later – across crossing oceans and five continents may spell financial catastrophe for the struggling Research In Motion aka RIM, whose stock shares have lost 60 percent of their value since the start of the year.

An RIM spokesman has said that the outage was caused by what Security Week called “a core switch failure within RIM’s infrastructure,” and not by a deliberate disabling attack. But the outage highlights the threat that determined cyber-warriors could pose to the nation’s communications systems if they target them.

For over a decade cyber-experts have urged the U.S. to upgrade critical infrastructure to protect vital dams, power plants, and communications systems from cyber-crime or cyber-attacks from rival countries. But the country remains complacent and highly vulnerable, as the BlackBerry outage shows.

During a recent cyber-security summit in New York, numerous experts warned that cyber-attacks could not only cause billions of dollars in damage to such vital systems, but endanger national security.

Read more: http://nation.foxnews.com/blackberry-outage/2011/10/13/welcome-world-cyber-terror-vulnerability#ixzz1amzsvuvp

FBI Arrests Man Who Allegedly Hacked Celebrities to Steal Nude Photos

wired


Federal authorities have arrested and charged a 35-year old Florida man for allegedly hacking dozens of Hollywood celebrities, including breaking into Scarlett Johansson’s phone and leaking nude pictures of her to the internet.

Christopher Chaney of Jacksonville, Florida, was charged with 26 counts of accessing protected computers without authorization, identity theft, damaging protected computers without authorization, and wiretapping.

Other prominent victims included Christina Aguilera, Mila Kunis, Simone Harouche and Renee Olstead. The FBI says Chaney hacked into the accounts of more than 50 people in the entertainment industry.

The FBI says Chaney used publicly available data about his victims to help him break into their e-mail accounts. For most victims he would then secretly set a forwarding address so every incoming e-mail would be forwarded to an account he controlled.

Chaney allegedly broke into Johansson’s Yahoo account in December 2010, just a month after he’d gotten into Harouche and Augilera’s accounts at Apple’s Me.com email service.

Photos that Johansson took of herself in the nude appeared online in early September, as did photos showing Kunis and Justin Timberlake in intimate settings. Chaney allegedly offered the photos to celebrity-focused blogs, though the indictment doesn’t say if Chaney attempted to sell the photos.

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Devices That Can Listen In on Cellphone Traffic, Control Your Phone

wsj.com

Law enforcement and military officials are increasingly using secret devices sometimes called “stingrays” to locate people via their cellphones, even when the phones aren’t in use, the Wall Street Journal reported recently. But finding people isn’t all that this type of gear can do.

These types of machines mimic a cell tower and cause your phone to connect to the machine instead of a real cellular site. Once that happens, there’s a lot that can be done to your phone.

For starters, “they can be set up to do wiretapping of the actual content,” said Matt Blaze, a computer science professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a former researcher at AT&T Labs.

Such devices also can jam phones, fake calls and text messages and drain the phone’s battery, according to documents available online for companies such as Advanced German Technology that sell these types of devices.

Other gadgets can listen to calls “passively,” meaning that instead of forcing the phone to connect to a fake base station, they simply grab signals transmitted between the mobile phone and the cellular network, allowing the operator to capture conversations.

One such device, available on the helpfully named spyshops.com, claims to be able to monitor a radius of up to about 3 miles and intercept 100 conversations simultaneously, according to the site. The device is “completely STEALTH – invisible and non-detectable, high performance and upgradeable,” the site says.

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Business travelers should be on alert for cyber-spying

dailyherald.com

Packing for business in China? Bring your passport and business cards, but maybe not that laptop loaded with contacts and corporate memos.

China’s massive market beckons to American businesses — the nation is the United States’ second-largest trading partner — but many are increasingly concerned about working amid electronic surveillance that is sophisticated and pervasive.

Security experts also warn about Russia, Israel and even France, which in the 1990s reportedly bugged first-class airplane cabins to capture business travelers’ conversations. Many other countries, including the United States, spy on one another for national security purposes.

But China’s brazen use of cyber-espionage stands out because the focus is often corporate, part of a broader government strategy to help develop the country’s economy, according to experts who advise American businesses and government agencies.

“I’ve been told that if you use an iPhone or BlackBerry, everything on it — contacts, calendar, emails — can be downloaded in a second. All it takes is someone sitting near you on a subway waiting for you to turn it on, and they’ve got it,” said Kenneth Lieberthal, a former senior White House official for Asia who is at the Brookings Institution.

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U.S. spy agency trying to go mobile

reuters.com

(Reuters) - Troy Lange knows that just mentioning cellphones is enough to give security officers heartburn at the National Security Agency.

Lange, as the NSA's mobility mission manager, is developing a smartphone that he wants to bring inside the super-secret U.S. spy agency to access classified information and apps while on the move. He wants it to work as easily as any of the smartphones those that are so ubiquitous in the outside world.

That is no small vision for an agency where entire buildings are designated as Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities, known as SCIFs in spy speak, with many restrictions to ensure the handling and discussion of secret information stays secure.

Visitors to the Fort Meade, Maryland, NSA complex are not allowed to bring outside cellphones into the building.

Lange argues that using smartphones inside areas that deal with secret material will increase efficiency.

"I want to get this into everybody's hands" -- every employee in the Defense Department, intelligence community and across government, he said, while acknowledging that kind of talk makes "the security people's heads pop off."

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HTC Sneaks Spying App into Android 2.3.4 Phones

hothardware.com

Looks like HTC has quietly slipped its users a spying app that tracks an alarming amount of user behavior and sends that data off to itself and perhaps others via a mysterious service in the cloud. The snooping app came nestled with the 2.3.4 Android update pushed out to some of its smartphones such as the Sensation 4G and EVO 4G.

TrevE and Team Synergy of the InfectedROM site (and XDA fame), discovered the app. HTC includes an application called Carrier IQ and Carrier IQ recently added a user-behavior logging feature called IQ Insight Experience Manager.

According to the Carrier IQ website: "IQ Insight Experience Manager uses data directly from the mobile phone itself to give a precise view of how users interact with both their phones and the services delivered through them, even if the phone is not communicating with the network. ... Identify exactly how your customers interact with services and which ones they use. See which content they consume, even offline."

But wait there's more. Turns out that after HTC collects these stats, CIQ isn't the only app with access to them.



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US cannot say how many had communications watched

(AP)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Like its predecessor, the Obama administration says it cannot count how many people in the U.S. have had their telephone calls and emails monitored by government agents in national security investigations under federal surveillance law.

The national intelligence office said in a letter this week to two Senate Democrats that it was "not reasonably possible to identify the number."

The senators, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, worry that the government may be monitoring communications of law-abiding citizens with inadequate justification.

"We're not asking these questions to embarrass the administration or make the intelligence community's job more difficult," Wyden said in a statement Thursday. "Congress needs to know if the laws it writes are being interpreted and implemented as intended before it is asked to extend them, and failing to assure the public that government agencies aren't violating the rights of law-abiding Americans erodes public confidence and makes it harder for intelligence agencies to do their jobs."

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ZeuS Trojan for Google Android Spotted

krebsonsecurity.com

Criminals have developed a component of the ZeuS Trojan designed to run on Google Android phones. The new strain of malware comes as security experts are warning about the threat from mobile malware that may use tainted ads and drive-by downloads.

Researchers at Fortinet said the malicious file is a new version of “Zitmo,” a family of mobile malware first spotted last year that stands for “ZeuS in the mobile.” The Zitmo variant, disguised as a security application, is designed to intercept the one-time passcodes that banks send to mobile users as an added security feature. It masquerades as a component of Rapport, a banking activation application from Trusteer. Once installed, the malware lies in wait for incoming text messages, and forwards them to a remote Web server.

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Lock down your cellphone

iol.co.za
Hacking into cellphones is “quite easy”, say local spyware specialists, and it has been commonplace around the world since the technology first came into circulation.

What makes it easy is the fact that few cellphone users bother to set the special PIN codes to allow them to use securely the special feature of accessing their messages from another phone. This means their cellphones remain on the service provider’s default settings – well known to all in the business.

And the user is left vulnerable to hackers such as Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator at the centre of the UK’s News of the World phone hacking scandal.

But even in cases where the four-digit message default setting has been changed, private investigators say it is relatively easy to access – as long as you have a connection placed inside the particular service provider, or the gift of the “blag” – see sidebar.

Acting on behalf of the tabloid newspaper, Mulcaire – in search of a scoop for his employers – is alleged to have invaded the privacy of not only politicians and celebrities, but also, post-mortem, murdered teenager Milly Dowler and UK soldiers who lost their lives in Afghanistan and other theatres of war.

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Warrantless cell phone searches spread to more states

cnn

(CNN) -- Think about all the data -- photos, videos, text messages, calendar items, apps, call log, voice mail, and e-mail -- on your cell phone right now. If you're arrested, could the police search your cell phone? And would they need a warrant?

That depends on which state you're in.

In California, it is legal for police to search an arrestee's cell phone without a warrant -- ever since a January decision by the California Supreme Court.

California civil rights advocates are pushing back. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is supporting California Assembly Bill SB 914, which would require police in that state to get a warrant before searching an arrestee's cell phone.

EFF also recently filed an amicus brief in the Oregon case of James Tyler Nix, a criminal suspect who was arrested and placed in a holding cell.

According to EFF, "Forty minutes after the arrest, without a warrant, an investigator fished through the suspect's cell phone looking for evidence related to his alleged crime. Law enforcement officials claim they didn't need a warrant because the search was 'incident to arrest' -- an exception to the warrant requirement intended to allow officers to perform a search for weapons or to prevent evidence from being destroyed in exigent circumstances."

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Smart Phone Spy Software

Beware of the "Stealth Genie"....
From the manufacturers website:

Stealth Genie is a monitoring software which is easy to install and use for Android, Blackberry and Windows Mobile smart phones. The software is very feature rich and takes less than a minute to install. It is also 100% undetectable. All you have to do is install the software on to the mobile phone of the person you wish to monitor and our product does the rest.

Stealth Genie works in the background on a phone without disrupting its functionality. It allows you to track your employees and the delivery staff out in the field through its geo location feature (GPS). Through this software you can listen in to their calls, read their messages, emails and record their surroundings. You can also access their contacts, memo’s and appointment books. Our software enables you to see videos, pictures and internet browsing history on your subjects’ mobile phone as well.

Be aware...Stay tuned..JDL

150,000 Chinese cell phones bugged

Note: Think your cell phone is safe from eavesdropping? Think again...
cnngo.com
A new cell phone program, X Undercover, allows people to hack smart phones, and its being marketed mainly to married women

You might be thinking cross-border, James Bond-type shenanigans after reading about 150,000 Chinese cell phone being bugged, but it turns out the latest cell phone virus -- X Undercover -- is catering to Chinese wives who want to check up on their husbands.

On Wednesday, the Beijing Times broke the story that the computer virus has infected over 150,000 smart phones in China, allowing hackers to remotely monitor calls.

The phone forces the target smart phone to use three-way calling -- unbeknown to the two callers -- to allow the perpetrator to monitor and copy conversations and text messages.

X Undercover can also secretly video the phone's owner as well as pinpoint the user's location with the phone's GPS system.

The virus doesn’t come cheap. ChinaDaily reports that it’s sold online for RMB 3,000 a pop, with marketing -- yes, even viruses have marketing these days -- to Chinese women (and men) who believe their spouses are cheating.

Although the virus is still available online, bugging and monitoring personal information is against the law in China, according to mobile security experts quoted in ChinaDaily.

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'We Know Where You Are' Technology

foxnews.com

Beware of that smartphone in your hand: It might be telling more about you than you'd like.

While a smartphone has become a communications must-have, offering services such as GPS location, Internet access and more, it's also gathering information about you -- data being marketed by your cellular provider to advertisers and other commercial services.

And that fact came as a shock to most consumers contacted by FoxNews.com, who had no idea their cell phone was anything but private.

“I feel violated, that they sell my information without me knowing," said Rupert Prout of Fresno, Calif. "I feel that they shouldn’t have the power and ability to do that.”

“I don’t love the idea of people selling information about me, trying to manipulate what I do in order to make a profit,” agreed Michaela Crib of Fresno, Calif.

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RIM lets India snoop on BBM, corporate e-mail still safe

electronista.com

In its long-standing security debacle with the Indian government, Research In Motion on Thursday said it has found a way to grant security agencies access to the BlackBerry Messenger service and public e-mail.

Corporate e-mail services are still secure from prying eyes, however. Whether this solution is satisfactory and meets the target date of January 31 remains to be seen.

RIM is confident the standard meets the government's requirements, though corporate e-mail access is one that hasn't been met. RIM continues to stand by its statement that neither it nor its carriers can decipher the encryptions of these ultra-secure services.

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Google's Android More Vulnerable Than iPhone, Says Trend Micro

huffingtonpost.com

According to Trend Micro Inc., the world's largest corporate security software provider, devices running Google's Android mobile operating software are more vulnerable to hackers and viruses than are Apple's iPhone devices.

During a recent interview in Taipei, Trend Micro chairman Steve Chang told Businessweek about Android's potentially dangerous security flaw: Android is open-source, which means the hacker can also understand the underlying architecture and source code [...] We have to give credit to Apple, because they are very careful about it. [...] Apple has a sandbox concept that isolates the platform, which prevents certain viruses that want to replicate themselves or decompose and recompose to avoid virus scanners.

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