Revealed: Technical Surveillance Threats

Revealed: Technical Surveillance Threats


Spy Cam 101

Not long ago while on assignment, I was asked "How many times do you actually find technical surveillance threats?"
My answer was "Well, I would tell you but then I would have to...." Just kidding,  The real answer is more often than you would think..
Although, not every technical surveillance threat involves finding a device. It can also can mean discovering a technical surveillance vulnerability. Like for instance, the allowance of cellular devices (w/ cameras) or iPads in conference rooms and during high level meetings. Or, the allowance of digital recorders within these areas, just to name a few.

It's not always "James Bond" spy gear that turns up during a sweep.

But every now and then, I still discover a "surprise" that may (or may not) have been left behind...on purpose.

For example, take this pen & pencil holder discovered during the wee hours of the morning while sweeping the "Presidential Suite" of one of our clients facilities.

Plain looking enough, but take a closer look... Through our Thermal Imaging Camera... Notice that hot spot? So did we...It turned out to be a hardwired Spy cam, with audio....Here's another look..

This was only one of the technical surveillance threats found during this assignment. Yes, you heard me right, only one of several threats found...

So, the short answer is YES, technical surveillance threats (although crude) like the above are used for intel collection purposes by your adversaries. i.e.; disgruntled employee, competitor, corp spy, eavesdropper, etc.
So be aware, these types of surveillance threats could be lurking closer than you might think...

If you don't mind me asking, When was your last TSCM Sweep?  Not Sure?  Contact Me here. I can help.

Stay tuned for the next "reveal"....JDL

The Spy Who Hacked Me

infosecurity-magazine.com


James Bond was more of a jock than a nerd, and he probably wouldn’t have known how to use a computer, says Danny Bradbury. How things have changed…

It was perhaps the first time that evidence had publicly emerged linking the Chinese with specific cyberwarfare and espionage practices. A Chinese documentary, The Internet Storm Is Coming, recently became available online. Buried in the program around 11 minutes in was B-roll footage of a tool enabling users to attack selected websites via a distributed denial-of-service technique. The clip, later pulled by the Chinese government, gave even more credence to the idea that the state was deliberately involved in cyberwarfare and espionage.

We’ve come a long way from Cold War espionage, when microdots, miniature cameras, and drop zones defined the shady world of spying. Today, misappropriating information from your enemies is more often than not an online affair. But the origins of cyber espionage stretch back to the Cold War.

Markus Hess, a German citizen employed by the KGB, was convicted of hacking his way into US government systems to find information about the Strategic Defense Initiative and other nuclear programs. Hess used the ARPANET, a precursor to the modern internet, but was captured after Clifford Stoll, a systems administrator at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was asked to investigate a small accounting error in the usage billing for the laboratory’s computer system. Stoll wrote up the resulting investigation, involving a complex honeypot operation designed to trap Hess and reveal his identity, in a book called The Cuckoo’s Egg.

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Compliance vs. Security: The Multiple Dimensions of Corporate Espionage

sys-con.com

You've spent months fixing the red items on an internal audit report and just passed a regulatory exam. You've performed a network vulnerability assessment and network pen test within the last year and have fixes in place. You've tightened up your information security policy and recently invested in a security information and event management (SIEM) solution. You're secure, right?

Put yourself in the shoes of a criminal. He knows that most security programs focus on regulatory compliance. He knows that IT departments have limited budgets. He also knows that you must defend against an almost unlimited number of attack vectors, while he just has to find one way in.

How do you protect against a sophisticated, motivated criminal? A professional spy who has targeted your company's trade secrets? A skilled insider with a specific purpose in mind? These types of people know that information comes in many forms, not just electronic, and they are trained to exploit any vulnerability. An effective information security program must incorporate more than just traditional pen tests and vulnerability assessments. 

Corporate espionage is on the rise for multiple reasons: the down economy, frequent job changes, and even governments that boost their economies through acquisition of trade secrets. In most cases, the end product is not as valuable as obtaining the means of production, the research and development, or the "know-how." This type of information will help to cut down on development costs and aid in the long-term production of a particular good. In the end, a company must get the best product to market first, at the best cost, through maneuvering around the competition.

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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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New ComSec LLC Video

Woman allergic to electricity, "electromagnetic sensitivity"

telegraph.co.uk

A British woman cannot use an electric kettle, keeps her washing machine in a concrete outhouse and cannot have neighbours with wireless internet because she is allergic to electricity.

Janice Tunnicliffe spends every night playing Scrabble by candlelight with her husband because she claims to have a rare condition called electrosensitivity.

She cannot bear to be anywhere near electromagnetic fields of any kind and, as a result, she cannot watch television, listen to the radio or talk on a mobile phone and has been left completely isolated from the modern world by her condition.

Mrs Tunnicliffe, 55, was struck down with the illness after receiving chemotherapy for bowel cancer three years ago.

Since then she has suffered constant headaches, chest pains, nausea and tingling in her arms and legs whenever she is near electrical devices or items that emit a signal.

Her only relief in this time was when her village, near Mansfield in rural Nottinghamshire, suffered a temporary power cut.

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CIA brain drain: Top staff go to private sector

cbsnews.com

In the decade since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, private intelligence firms and security consultants have peeled away veterans from the top reaches of the CIA, hiring scores of longtime officers in large part to gain access to the burgeoning world of intelligence contracting.

At least 91 of the agency's upper-level managers have left for the private sector in the past 10 years, according to data compiled by The Washington Post. Several of the top positions have turned over multiple times in that period: In addition to three directors, the CIA has lost four of its deputy directors for operations, three directors of its counterterrorism center and all five of the division chiefs who were in place the day of the Sept. 11 attacks.

In many quarters in Washington, government officials decamp for the private sector as a matter of course. Defense consultancies routinely hire generals retiring from the Pentagon; the city's lobbying firms are stacked with former members of Congress and administration officials.

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AC Adapter Hidden Camera

You never know who's watching...JDL

Motion Activated, Ultra Covert Hidden Outlet Camera with Built-in Recording.

The power plug adapter spy cam is an ultra-compact and portable, all-in-one covert video recording system. The cleverly designed AC Adapter houses a hidden camera and DVR; the built-in DVR records video directly onto the included Micro SD Card. All you have to do is plug the device into an electrical power outlet, insert the Micro SD Card into the AC Adapter w/ DVR Memory Card slot to start recording video. The AC Adapter with DVR is designed to look like a common household electronic; no one walking past this AC charger would ever suspect it was a highly-versatile and portable video recording system.

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Electronic Bug Sweep Video

Corporate espionage on the rise...

newsnet5.com

CLEVELAND - The threat of foreign espionage seemingly disappeared with the Cold War. But there is a new spy game in town.

"Now you're talking about economic espionage and that is one of the biggest threats to national security that we have," said Brad Beman, head of the counter intelligence unit for the Cleveland branch of the FBI.

Beman warns that today's spies are just as interested in the office computer as government secrets.

"Other countries that are not necessarily friendly to the United States are gaining out technology and gaining an edge potentially over us," Beman said.

Some of the most dangerous spies don’t work for foreign governments, but for local companies. Employees motivated by revenge, money or patriotism are betraying company secrets, according to the FBI.

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Why Take a Preventive Approach to TSCM?

All too often corporations or individuals hire a professional Technical Surveillance Countermeasures (TSCM) or "bug sweep" service provider only after they have a strong suspicion they are a victim of illegal eavesdropping. While it may seem like a logical approach to verify your suspicions first, the choice to delay can be an irresponsible and costly choice. Every minute an illegal eavesdropper maintains access to your information is valuable to the eavesdropper -- and costly to you. The longer you wait, the more opportunity the eavesdropper has to gather enough competition sensitive, company proprietary or damaging personal information to cause your company, or you, irreparable harm.

Read more here...

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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Tools of Tradecraft: The CIA’s Historic Spy Kit

wired

Whenever James Bond needed a nifty device to snap a surreptitious surveillance picture or escape the gilded clutches of Auric Goldfinger, he could count on the ingenious minds in the Secret Service's Q Division to devise a solution. Real-world Bonds working for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, and its precursor the Office of Strategic Services, could turn to the Office of Research and Development for similar tradecraft tools.

From mosquito drones to couture cameras, the CIA had its agents' needs covered. Some of these devices are now displayed in the CIA's museum, located at the agency's Langley, Virginia, headquarters.

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Hackers Reveal Offers to Spy on Corporate Rivals

nytimes.com
WASHINGTON — A fight between a group of pro-WikiLeaks hackers and a California-based Internet security business has opened a window onto the secretive world of private companies that offer to help corporations investigate and discredit their critics.

This week, hackers said they had penetrated the computers of HBGary Federal, a security company that sells investigative services to corporations, and posted tens of thousands of what appear to be its internal company e-mails on the Internet.

The documents appear to include pitches for unseemly ways to undermine adversaries of Bank of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, like doing background research on their critics and then distributing fake documents to embarrass them.

The bank and the chamber do not appear to have directly solicited the spylike services of HBGary Federal. Rather, HBGary Federal offered to do the work for Hunton & Williams, a corporate law firm that has represented them.

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Chinese Hackers Target Western Oil Companies

spinport.com

A US security firm has declared that China-based hackers have effected illegal entry to the computers of oil companies in the US, Taiwan, Kazakhstan and elsewhere. The report, released on Thursday by McAfee, says hackers purloined sensitive information concerning bidding, operations, and finance for oil fields. No companies were named.

Attacks commenced in 2009. Experts rate China as the hub of internet crime, including sophisticated industrial espionage against major companies.

China’s government has denied involvement, but a cyber-attack on the British Foreign Office was recently attributed to it. An email received by three personnel claimed to relate to an upcoming visit to the region, and appeared utterly innocent, but a document was attached which contained computer code that would have adversely affected any machine that opened it. Systems identified the threat. Foreign Secretary William Hague said it was the work of “a hostile state intelligence agency,” which intelligence sources say is China.

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Spies at Work Know Where to Find Your Secrets

bloomberg.com

“A mental health specialist recommended that the Army private accused of leaking classified material to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks not be deployed to Iraq, but his immediate commanders sent him anyway.”

That’s according to the Washington Post, which noted that the soldier, Bradley Manning, was allegedly storing classified material on an unclassified server, had been demoted for assault, and was acting so erratically that his master sergeant disabled his weapon. So why did this man have a security clearance, and what was he doing in a war zone with access to State Department cables unrelated to his job?

Before you call the Army stupid and forget it, why does your mailroom clerk have unrestricted access to everything on your company’s server, including corporate secrets, or your clients’ merger plans and bid data? And why was a Ford Motor Co. engineer allegedly able to steal thousands of sensitive documents that had nothing to do with his job? Poor information security isn’t just a government problem.

Economic espionage is intensifying. The foreign intelligence services of China, Russia, Iran and other countries are after our technology, and most of what they want is in the electronic-information systems of private companies -- and the law and accounting firms that work for them.

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Protecting against industrial espionage

canadianmanufacturing.com
How do you prevent competitors from stealing your ideas?

When three executives at Renault in Paris, France, were suspended and accused of leaking key company information to China, it came as no surprise to those in the highly competitive automotive manufacturing industry.

While GM would not comment specifically on information about security initiatives citing competition, Jason Easton, corporate communications manager for General Motors of Canada Ltd., said “at GM of Canada we are very conscious of confidentiality and competitiveness issues. While many of these issues have always existed—automobiles are one of the highest technology retail products available to consumers—the mediums through which information can be transferred, and the speed at which this can happen, are the challenges that many companies face.”

Canadian Metalworking Online also contacted Ford Motor Company and Chrysler, but neither of the companies would provide comments about measures they take to protect against industrial espionage.

In the Renault case, the three executives were suspected of leaking information related to the company’s electric vehicle program. The multi-billion dollar program is a key part of Renault’s growth strategy and has been working with Japanese partner Nissan.

According to a Reuters press wire story on January 7, this isn’t the first time France’s car industry has been hit by information leaks. In 2007, a Chinese student doing a work placement at car parts maker Valeo was given a prison sentence for obtaining confidential documents from the automaker.

How do you protect your company and your manufacturing ideas from competitors?

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Spotting corporate espionage

Note: One of our ERI family, Congrats Crispin! JDL

ft.com

From the top of the Gherkin building in London, Crispin Sturrock points out an anonymous-looking office block in the swirling snow below. “There’s a device in there,” says the chief executive of White Rock Defence Systems, an information security consultancy that helps companies protect themselves against spies. “They’re not clients of ours, but whenever we scan for transmissions in nearby buildings, we pick it up. It’s been there for ages, just streaming information out.” The building in question is bugged with an electronic device transmitting information about one of its tenants. In the era of WikiLeaks, it is tempting to view all leaks as news headlines. But in general, corporate leaks tend to be of interest only to a very small group of people – an organisation’s competitors or potential buyer. “The reasons people engage in competitive information gathering are usually financial gain and leverage,” says Mr Sturrock.

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Leaked Apple secrets lead to arrests

wavy.com

iPhone secrets among tips that led to arrests

Updated: Friday, 17 Dec 2010, 8:29 AM EST
Published : Friday, 17 Dec 2010, 8:28 AM EST

• TOM HAYS,Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) - Federal prosecutors in Manhattan broadened their insider trading crackdown Thursday, arresting four people on charges alleging that so-called "expert consultants" revealed secrets about Apple Inc.'s iPhone and other technology products to hedge funds seeking a trading edge on quarterly earnings reports.

The latest probe targeted Primary Global Research, a Mountain View, Calif.-based firm that offered consulting services to investors on industry trends, issues and regulations. Instead, prosecutors allege, firm executive James Fleishman used four consultants employed by publicly traded companies to create a corrupt clearinghouse for confidential information.

Fleishman, 41, was charged with wire fraud and conspiracy. Three others, all outside "expert consultants" for Primary Global Research until earlier this year, were charged with wire fraud and conspiracy to commit securities fraud and wire fraud, according to papers filed in federal court in Manhattan.

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Five tips for protecting mobile devices

techrepublic.com
Attacks against information assets — government, corporate, and personal — have been going on for some time. Yet many users and organizations have blatantly ignored recommendations for protecting mobile devices, exposing themselves, their businesses, their customers, and often employees to harm. These devices in the hands of mobile workers are exposed to a variety of threats:

• Hotel wired networks are often wide open to eavesdropping by cybercriminals or other guests. Jacking into a network frequently equates to sending and receiving information over a single collision domain. This means all packets for a set of rooms, a floor, several floors, or even the entire hotel/motel are seen by all other systems on the network. Unprotected packets are prime targets for capture, analysis, and data extraction.
• Connecting to unencrypted hotel or other public wireless networks, sending sensitive information out into the ether, is a well-known problem. I won’t beat it to death.
• Improper configuration of firewalls or the total lack of an end-user device security perimeter, allows anyone, anytime, and anywhere to use public networks to peruse private information on laptops, smartphones, or PDAs.
• Some unencrypted stolen or lost devices are a treasure chest of information, including passwords, customer and employee information, and user identity data. In large, chaotic venues, it isn’t difficult to lose a laptop or PDA.

This is not a complete list of potential attack vectors, but proper attention to those four issues reduces risk to a reasonable and appropriate level. The following steps are a good start in preventing information or system compromise.

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