Texas constable admits ordering bugging

chron.com

DALLAS (AP) — A small-town Texas constable told the FBI he secretly bugged other officials' offices after they were accused of illegally forcing motorists to forfeit their cash, according to a search warrant affidavit.

The affidavit, based on interviews conducted by FBI agents and Texas Rangers, quotes Shelby CountyConstable Fred Walker as saying he authorized the installation of hidden surveillance cameras and digital recorders even though he didn't have legal authority. It also includes a statement from a witness who claims Walker helped organize a scheme to sell drugs seized from suspects.

It's just another chapter in a longtime drama in Tenaha, a town of 1,160 near the Louisiana border, where seizures of cash from motorists stopped for traffic violations along U.S. Highway 59 — a well-known drug route that runs from the U.S.-Mexico border to Canada — have led to lawsuits and a federal criminal investigation.

Walker, 53, was Tenaha's city marshal at the time the alleged bugging occurred. He was elected constable in 2010.

In a brief phone interview, Walker said he knew nothing about the affidavit, filed in U.S. District Court in Lufkin on Feb. 6. When asked if he arranged to have offices bugged, he hung up.

Walker's attorney, Bassey Akpaffiong of Houston, said prosecutors have told him to expect an indictment. Akpaffiong said Walker was never involved in selling drugs and never told the FBI he authorized the installation of secret listening devices.

Malcolm Bales, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas, declined to comment.

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How to Know If Someone Bugged Your Room

theatlanticwire.com


For tips on sweeping a room for surreptitious surveillance devices, look no further than the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That's where members of the federal government have been going for years to find out who's wiretapped their telephone or implanted a microphone in their corner office. And now we know a lot more about the bureau's routine wiretap inspections thanks to GovernmentAttic.org, a website that publishes documents from Freedom of Information Act requests. The site has published a 66MB cache of correspondence from 1952 to 1995 detailing various issues of telephone security often involving paranoid government officials from senators to post master generals to secretaries of the Department of Agriculture to President Richard Nixon who think someone is surreptitiously listening to their conversations. 

It's going to take an army of readers to rummage through the entire cache of FBI documents but from what we've read so far, much of the correspondence involves government officials requesting wiretap inspections from the FBI, typically because they fear sensitive information has leaked from their office, and, upon inspection, the FBI finds nothing. Interestingly, they do often provide an informative report on how they went about sweeping the room.

As you can imagine, the descriptions of wiretap sweeps get much more technical from the '50s to the '70s to the '90s. In the old days, a wiretap inspection was simpler. Take this sweep of the office of Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield in 1953. 

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Note: A "Do it yourself" sweep, is kind of like "do it yourself" plumbing...you get what you pay for...

Don't let those "leaks" continue...contact me, I can help. ~JDL

Police group members react to Anonymous hacking

news10.net
SACRAMENTO, CA - A day after Anonymous hacked into California Statewide Law Enforcement Association's website, CSLEA members are still learning about the security breach.

Plus, the CSLEA homepage is still down.

RELATED STORY: Thousands affected after Anonymous hacks police union website

The well-known international hacking group released the names, home addresses, and phone numbers of public safety professionals, many of them police officers. It also exposed credit card information on purchases made in their online gift shop.

Anonymous claimed on their post that they have 2,500 names and passwords, and in some cases, credit card numbers. The hacker group justified releasing the information asserting, "California law enforcement officers are notorious for brutality."

Union president Alan Barcelona said CSLEA had information taken in November. All members who had their information breached then were contacted by phone or letter. The letter, dated Nov. 10, "confirms that credit card information of customers of the CSLEA online store had been compromised"

It stated, "Fortunately, most of the credit cards that were compromised had expired." And, it went on to state, "Additionally, all of the information which was previously maintained on the site has been purged."

Teresa Dobbins, an employee of the Department of Justice, never got word of the breach in November. And she wasn't informed that her personal information, including her email address, phone number, and home address, were leaked onto the web New Year's Day, until News 10 contacted her.

"If they were aware of it, they should have tried to notify me before the media did," Dobbins said.

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VoIP eavesdropping: Hardening network security to contain VoIP risks

searchsecurity.techtarget.com

Every organization considering a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone system deployment hears the same dire warnings: “Routing voice calls over a data network exposes calls to eavesdropping.”

While it’s certainly true that any telephone call carries a certain degree of eavesdropping risk, is it true that VoIP calls have an inherently higher degree of risk? In this tip, we explore the ins and outs of VoIP eavesdropping.

VoIP eavesdropping is possible First, it’s important to be clear about one thing: It is absolutely possible to eavesdrop on a VoIP telephone call. It’s also possible to eavesdrop on a telephone call placed using the traditional public switched telephone network (PSTN). The difference lies in the tools and skill set needed to conduct the eavesdropping.

On a traditional telephone network, someone seeking to eavesdrop on a call generally must have physical access to either the telephone or telephone cable, at least at the initiation of the attack. This type of attack is typical in the movies. Whether it’s the good guys or the bad guys conducting the eavesdropping, someone gains access to either a telephone handset or the telephone network interface box -- sometimes located outside a home or office -- places a wiretap listening device on the box, and then monitors calls on an ongoing basis.


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Cameramaker Red claims espionage

variety.com
In a saga worthy of a Hollywood thriller, allegations of email hacking and industrial espionage have surfaced in the camera industry in a lawsuit filed by digital camera maker Red against rival Arri.

In the suit filed Dec. 21 in federal court in Orange County, Calif., Red accuses Arri of stealing technical details and development plans for Red cameras, giving Arri an unfair advantage.

Much of Red's complaint rests on facts revealed in an August plea deal between federal prosecutors and former Arri executive Michael Bravin, who is also a defendant in the suit. Bravin pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of email hacking, admitting as part of the deal that he accessed the email account of Band Pro chief executive Amnon Band.

Bravin, who according to his LinkedIn profile worked for Band Pro for more than 16 years, resigned as Band Pro's chief technology officer to become Arri's VP of market development for digital camera products in January 2010.

From around December 2009 through June 2010, Bravin had access to Amnon Band's email account, as Bravin has admitted. Under his plea deal, he was to serve two months in jail and pay $20,000 in restitution to Band Pro as well as legal costs. Bravin now lists himself on LinkedIn as principal at the Digital Picture Co.

In its complaint, Red asserts that during the time Bravin was hacking Band's email account, Band Pro and Red were discussing a possible joint venture. Red says Band's emails contained detailed descriptions of the technology used in Red's cameras and Red's plans for introducing new models and features.

Red alleges that Bravin passed that information to Arri, giving Arri an unfair competitive advantage, especially with respect to the launch and marketing of the Arri Alexa camera. The Alexa was released in 2010 and is seen as a direct competitor to Red's Epic.

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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

Feds: Trio hacked Wi-Fi or burglarized 50 firms

Seattletimes.nwsource.com

Seattle police detectives say they've unraveled a theft ring that operated both in cyberspace and through old-fashioned burglaries with a technological twist — breaking into a company with the sole purpose of installing malicious software to enable future thefts.

It took nearly three years, but Seattle police detectives say they've unraveled a theft ring that operated both in cyberspace and through old-fashioned burglaries with a technological twist — breaking into a company with the sole purpose of installing malicious software to enable future thefts.

Federal prosecutors have indicted three men — Joshua Allen Witt, 34; Brad Eugene Lowe, 36; and John Earl Griffin, 36 — on charges of conspiracy and eight other counts including accessing a protected computer to further fraud, access device fraud and aggravated identity theft.

The 20-page indictment lays out a scheme that U.S. Attorney Jenny Durkan on Wednesday said was "both sophisticated and rudimentary," and combined high technology with broken glass and jimmied locks.

The trio is accused of targeting at least 53 companies, with losses expected to mount into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"In some cases, the victims were both burgled and cyber-burgled," Durkan said at a news conference.

The indictment accused the men of "wardriving" — cruising in a vehicle outfitted with a powerful Wi-Fi receiver to detect business wireless networks. They then would hack into the company's network from outside, cracking the security code and accessing company computers and information.

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Naked eye: hidden cameras more common than you think?

Note: This just in from our ERI Associate & Friend from down under, Julian Claxton, Counter Surveillance Expert & Director of Jayde Consulting. Congrats Julian! Job well done!



smh.com.au



Hidden cameras in change rooms and toilets are far more common than people realise and advances in technology have made them so small that they are virtually impossible to detect, a Sydney counter-surveillance expert said.

Organisations are typically oblivious to the presence of hidden cameras and, on the odd occasions they do find them, are reluctant to come forward to police for fear of reputational damage, said Julian Claxton, a surveillance expert whose company, Jayde Consulting, conducts sweeps for recording devices.

Just this year, Claxton has investigated two instances in Sydney, one involving a hidden camera in the change room of a Sydney private school and another involving a camera placed in the toilet of a building in Haymarket.

"Two or three inquiries a year where devices have been found is quite significant … in this business you would be lucky to find something 1 or 2 per cent of the time," said Claxton, estimating he saw only 10 per cent of the reported cases in Sydney.

"We believe that there's a lot more going on that's not being picked up."

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Note: By the way, when was the last time your organization requested a sweep for electronic eavesdropping devices? Not Sure? Contact me, I can help. ~JDL

Cyber-Espionage Against U.S. Firms More Widespread than Previously Thought

nationaldefensemagazine.org



That foreign adversaries are using computer network vulnerabilities to steal military data from the U.S. government and its contractors is well known and hardly surprising.



Nations for centuries have long sought to steal such secrets from one another and spy-craft has simply moved into cyberspace.



However, the unveiling of a massive cyber-espionage network in August goes well beyond the unwritten rules that informally govern nations when it comes to the theft of technical data or insights into the minds of leaders and their intentions, said Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research at network security firm, McAfee.



Alperovitch analyzed one command-and-control server that had been used to spread malware for five years before McAfee exposed it.



“Even we were surprised by the enormous diversity of the victim organizations and were taken aback by the audacity of the perpetrators,” he wrote in a blog.



Examining the logs to determine who the victims were, and how long the intrusion lasted before it was detected, Alperovitch found 30 different industries on the list.



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Phone hacking: News of the World reporter's letter reveals cover-up

guardian.co.uk

he News of the World's former royal correpsondent, Clive Goodman, who was jailed over phone hacking. A letter from him claims phone hacking was widely discussed at the paper. Photograph: Carl De Souza/AFP/Getty Images

Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch and their former editor Andy Coulson all face embarrassing new allegations of dishonesty and cover-up after the publication of an explosive letter written by the News of the World's disgraced royal correspondent, Clive Goodman.

In the letter, which was written four years ago but published only on Tuesday, Goodman claims that phone hacking was "widely discussed" at editorial meetings at the paper until Coulson himself banned further references to it; that Coulson offered to let him keep his job if he agreed not to implicate the paper in hacking when he came to court; and that his own hacking was carried out with "the full knowledge and support" of other senior journalists, whom he named.

The claims are acutely troubling for the prime minister, David Cameron, who hired Coulson as his media adviser on the basis that he knew nothing about phone hacking. And they confront Rupert and James Murdoch with the humiliating prospect of being recalled to parliament to justify the evidence which they gave last month on the aftermath of Goodman's allegations. In a separate letter, one of the Murdochs' own law firms claim that parts of that evidence were variously "hard to credit", "self-serving" and "inaccurate and misleading".

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Electronic skin tattoo has medical, gaming, spy uses

breitbart.com

A hair-thin electronic patch that adheres to the skin like a temporary tattoo could transform medical sensing, computer gaming and even spy operations, according to a US study published Thursday.

The micro-electronics technology, called an epidermal electronic system (EES), was developed by an international team of researchers from the United States, China and Singapore, and is described in the journal Science.

"It's a technology that blurs the distinction between electronics and biology," said co-author John Rogers, a professor in materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"Our goal was to develop an electronic technology that could integrate with the skin in a way that is mechanically and physiologically invisible to the user."

The patch could be used instead of bulky electrodes to monitor brain, heart and muscle tissue activity and when placed on the throat it allowed users to operate a voice-activated video game with better than 90 percent accuracy.

"This type of device might provide utility for those who suffer from certain diseases of the larynx," said Rogers. "It could also form the basis of a sub-vocal communication capability, suitable for covert or other uses."

The wireless device is nearly weightless and requires so little power it can fuel itself with miniature solar collectors or by picking up stray or transmitted electromagnetic radiation, the study said.

Less than 50-microns thick -- slightly thinner than a human hair -- the devices are able to adhere to the skin without glue or sticky material.

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New ComSec LLC Video

Hacking, tapping and spying - business as usual

cnn.com

Johannesburg, South Africa (CNN) - The skullduggery by the News of the World newspaper in Britain exposed an underbelly of phone taps and lies.

While the fall of the newspaper and the shenanigans of the Murdoch business empire are a compelling and continuing drama, we should be reminded that this sort of behavior is not limited to the tabloid muckraking press.

Underhand tactics, secrets and illegal tampering with private information is a growing and common problem in the corporate world. Call it what you may - industrial espionage, corporate hacking, commercial spying - the practice is widespread and deeply entrenched on a global scale.

In Africa, the practice of stealing or secretly accessing information about another company –­ more than likely in competition with yours – is not as widespread as it is in Europe, America and Asia. However, here in South Africa the practice of corporate spookery is “massive” and “rife,” according to a security expert working for a global bank.

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Google breaks up Gmail spying campaign

scmagazineus.com

Google has identified and disrupted a campaign operating out of eastern China meant to hijack and monitor the Gmail accounts belonging to hundreds of users, the technology giant revealed Wednesday.

Victims included U.S. and Asian government officials -- mostly from South Korea, military members, journalists and Chinese political activists, said Eric Grosse, engineering director of the Google's security team, in a blog post.

The campaign appears to trace back to Jinan, China and involves the theft of user's Gmail passwords, likely through phishing, he said. Google was able to disrupt the campaign, secure the affected accounts and notify the targeted individuals.

"The goal of this effort seems to have been to monitor the contents of these users' emails, with the perpetrators apparently using stolen passwords to change peoples' forwarding and delegation settings," Grosse wrote. "Google enables you to forward your emails automatically, as well as grant others access to your account."

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Corporate Spying: The Next Growth Industry

economywatch.com

The corporate spying business is booming. The largest companies around the world are all involved in “competitive intelligence gathering” by highly trained professionals according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

"Corporations have people trained to obtain raw data from a wide range of sources and apply traditional intelligence analysis techniques to produce usable information," PwC dispute analysis and investigations director Richard Batten said.

In a story from Wired:

Veterans from the most infamous private security firm on Earth and one of the military’s most controversial datamining operations are teaming up to provide the Fortune 500 with their own private spies - who call themselves Jellyfish.

Jellyfish is about corporate-information dominance. It swears it’s leaving all the spy-world baggage behind. No guns, no governments digging through private records of its citizens.

“Our organization is not going to be controversial,”

pledges Keith Mahoney, the Jellyfish CEO, a former Navy officer and senior executive with Blackwater’s intelligence arm, Total Intelligence Solutions.

During a Thursday press conference in Washington that served as a coming-out party for the company, Jellyfish’s executives described an all-purpose “private-sector intelligence” firm.

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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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PayPal and eBay accuse Google of corporate espionage

timesofoman.com
SAN FRANCISCO: Google faced a lawsuit after it unveiled a free mobile application that turns a smartphone into an electronic wallet and is designed to replace plastic credit cards.

PayPal and eBay filed a lawsuit in a California state court on Thursday charging that the Internet giant tapped into trade secrets for its newly released Google Wallet. Google did not immediately respond to the allegations.

PayPal spent three years trying to work out a deal in which it would handle payments for Android smartphones, only to see Google scuttle the talks and hire its lead negotiator Osama Bedier, according to court documents.

Bedier worked at the eBay-owned online financial services unit as a vice-president of platform, mobile, and new ventures until being hired in January by Google.

He played a central role at Google’s official unveiling in New York with financial partners Citibank, MasterCard and First Data and telecom ally Sprint, saying Google Wallet is being field tested and will be available this summer.

Google Wallet will initially work with Google’s Nexus S 4G smartphone from Sprint, the third-largest US wireless provider, and will eventually be expanded to other phones equipped with near field communication (NFC) technology.

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Insider Data Theft Costs Bank of America $10 Million

pcworld.com
A Bank of America insider who sold customer data to criminals cost the bank at least US$10 million in losses.

Bank of America began notifying customers of the incident recently, but is not providing many details of the case which is still under investigation. The theft, "involved a now former associate who provided customer information to people outside the bank, who then used the information to commit fraud against our customers," said Bank of America spokeswoman Colleen Haggerty, in an email message.

The bank lost at least $10 million to the criminals, said James Kollar, a special agent with U.S. Secret Service in Los Angeles. "There was information that was coming from the bank to the outsiders," he said. "It was basically a check scam."

About 95 members of the loosely affiliated criminal gang behind the alleged fraud, including the bank employee, were swept up in a February 2011 law enforcement action, Kollar said. However, the names of the accused have not been released, and the court case is under seal as the investigation continues.

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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

On The Internet, No One Watches The Wiretappers

Note: Heads up, this just in from our friend "Mike"...JDL
forbes.com
When Twitter revealed in January that it had received a Department of Justice order to hand over information on three users associated with WikiLeaks, the real surprise wasn’t that an Internet company had been asked to secretly spill user data for a criminal investigation. It was that, for once, the firm didn’t kept quiet about it.

Chris Soghoian, a privacy researcher at Indiana University and the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, has been following that Twitter case closely as a potentially precedent-shaping test for how and when the government can nab users’ online information. And now he’s released a paper that puts the case in context, outlining just how little Americans are told about the extent of government surveillance on the Internet.

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