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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Which Telecoms Store Your Data the Longest? Secret Memo Tells All

wired

The nation’s major mobile-phone providers are keeping a treasure trove of sensitive data on their customers, according to newly-released Justice Department internal memo that for the first time reveals the data retention policies of America’s largest telecoms.

The single-page Department of Justice document, “Retention Periods of Major Cellular Service Providers,” (.pdf) is a guide for law enforcement agencies looking to get information — like customer IP addresses, call logs, text messages and web surfing habits – out of U.S. telecom companies, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon.

The document, marked “Law Enforcement Use Only” and dated August 2010, illustrates there are some significant differences in how long carriers retain your data.

Verizon, for example, keeps a list of everyone you’ve exchanged text messages with for the past year, according to the document. But T-Mobile stores the same data up to five years. It’s 18 months for Sprint, and seven years for AT&T.

That makes Verizon appear to have the most privacy-friendly policy. Except that Verizon is alone in retaining the actual contents of text messages. It allegedly stores the messages for five days, while T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint don’t store them at all.

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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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Court Affirms Legality Of Recording Police Officers

wbur.org

Last Friday, the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling that affirmed, stronger than ever, the rights of individuals to openly record the actions of police officers.

In 2007, a young lawyer named Simon Glik was walking through Boston Common when he saw three police officers arresting a teenager. Glik thought the officers were getting a little rough, so he flipped open his cellphone camera and started shooting video.

The officers arrested Glik for, in their minds, violating the state’s wire-tapping law, even though the whole incident happened out in public and Glik didn’t try to conceal the fact that he was recording.

The ACLU took up Glik’s cause and the courts threw out the charges against him. Since then, the Boston Police Department has been instructing personnel that the state’s wiretapping law does not apply to people making unconcealed audio or video recordings in public. But Glik and the ACLU have pressed on, suing the BPD and the individual officers for violating his First Amendment rights.

The officers moved to have the suit dismissed, saying they were just enforcing an interpretation of the law that was handed down to them by their superiors. But on Friday, the federal court disagreed.

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Businesses Increasingly Under Attack From Cyber-Security Threats

marketwatch.com

Cyber-Criminals Targeting Mobile Devices and Social Media Sites

SAN JOSE, Calif., Sept. 1, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- SonicWALL, Inc., the leading provider of intelligent network security and data protection solutions, today issued its mid-year cyber-threat intelligence bulletin. The bulletin reveals that businesses are increasingly under attack by cyber-criminals who seek to exploit employees connecting to corporate networks via mobile devices and their rising use of social media. Growth in Android-based malware and social media scams such as click-jacking on Facebook and malicious links sent over Twitter are creating new and heightened levels of business vulnerability from data intrusion, theft and loss. Productivity and profitability are also compromised due to network and application downtime. Data for the bulletin was sourced from the SonicWALL Global Response Intelligent Defense (GRID) Network(TM), which gathers, analyzes and correlates billions of dynamic, real-time global cyber-threats.



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Engineers convicted in Goodyear corporate espionage case

tyrepress.com



A US federal judge has sentenced two former Wyko engineers to four years probation and 150 hours of community service after they were convicted of convicted of stealing trade secrets from Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. in a corporate espionage case that first surfaced in 2009.



According to the Knoxville News Sentinel, federal prosecutors had wanted US district court judge Thomas W. Phillips to give Clark Alan Roberts and Sean Edward Howley at least 10 months in prison, but their lack of previous convictions and “ample” family and community support reportedly won out.



A jury found Roberts and Howley each guilty in December on 10-counts alleging they conspired to steal and use trade secrets. Roberts and Howley, who were employees of Wyko Tire Technology Inc. at the time, had been accused of visiting Goodyear’s Topeka, Kansas plant in 2007 so Howley could use his camera phone to take pictures OTR tyre production procedures.



During the trial Tom Frey, a consultant for Goodyear and a former Goodyear manager, had estimated it cost $520,000 to develop the design drawings for the equipment the defendants were convicted of photographing and that Goodyear made $17 million in 2007 from the sale of tyres that machine produces. However Judge Phillips rejected Frey as a witness and noted that he was not employed by Goodyear and had not produced documentation to verify these figures.



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Android becomes most attacked mobile platform

security.cbronline.com

Going rate of one million stolen email addresses is $25, says cyber security company

Google's operating system (OS) for mobile phones, Android, has become a favourite target for cyber criminals with the amount of malware targeted at Android devices jumping 76% since last quarter, to become the most attacked mobile OS.

According to computer security company McAfee's latest 'Threats Report: Second Quarter 2011', this year has also resulted in the busiest ever first half-year in malware history.

In the second quarter (2Q) of 2011, Android OS-based malware surpassed Symbian OS for the most popular target for mobile malware developers.

The report also said that while Symbian OS and Java ME remain the most targeted to date, the rapid rise in Android malware indicates that the platform could become an increasing target for cybercriminals - affecting everything from calendar apps, to SMS messages to a fake Angry Birds updates.

McAfee Labs senior vice-president Vincent Weafer said, "This year we've seen record-breaking numbers of malware, especially on mobile devices, where the uptick is in direct correlation to popularity."

Weafer also said that cyber criminals are building sophisticated malware which are difficult to detect.

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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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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

Android Malware Quadrupled in Six Months

pcmag.com
Android malware samples quadrupled between June 2010 and January 2011, according to a report from Juniper Networks and BullGuard mobile security released Monday.

The figure itself means little, since the size of the Android Market more than tripled from 80,000 to 300,000 apps between August 2010 and May 2011, but as cybercriminals become more sophisticated Android users need to start protecting their phones like they would their computers.

See PCMag's pick of the top 15 Mobile Security Tools for more information.

The greatest mobile malware risk comes from legitimate apps that have been injected with malicious software and re-packaged for app stores, Juniper wrote. DroidDream, HongTouTou, and Geinimi all used this method.

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You Can Stop iPhones from Spying on You, But Not Androids

theatlanticwire.com

With a new software update, Apple resolved its iPhone tracking scandal that emerged after two data scientists discovered the phones record users' every move for a year. Customers of Google's Android phones aren't so lucky. Apple's new iOS update 4.3.3. makes the iPhone stop backing up location data on your computer and deletes the data when Location Services is turned off. The company says the location information is not transmitted to Apple, however, the information still remains on your phone if you don't disable Location Services. The fix, available for download now, comes just one week after Apple initially addressed the issue.

If you've got an Android phone, however, good luck. As Engadget's former managing editor Nilay Patel tweets, "It took Apple just a week to deploy this update to all iPhone users, while Android makers are still shipping 2.2." Patael's quote speaks to Android's nagging fragmentation problem in which updates come slowly because software is not compatible with all the different Android models produced by various handset makers. TechCrunch's MG Siegler highlights the problem:

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Apple Doesn't Spy, Vows to Fix Spying

thestreet.com
NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Apple(AAPL_) denied, confessed to and then said it will change its iPhone tracking practices that have created a swirl of outcry about potential privacy invasion.

In classic Apple fashion, the company issued a press release Wednesday consisting of 10 questions the company asked itself. In addition to the 10 answers, the company said it is preparing a software update that changes the way it collects data about iPhone locations.

First came the denial.

"Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so," said the release.

Next came the explanation.

The short version: Apparently Apple doesn't track iPhones -- it collects the data from WiFi and cell tower antennas that track iPhones.

The long version: In order to find your location faster, Apple said it uses a database of antennas in a given area. This ready cache of antenna info can quickly pinpoint you on a map -- that's a lot faster than if you had to wait only for a GPS satellite report.

While Apple says this offers fast, accurate and secure location services, "users are confused" because the company has "not provided enough education about these issues to date."

So it's not your fault for being confused and angered about location snooping. It's Apple's -- among others' -- fault for not explaining how awesome the system is.

Apple also blamed bugs in the system.

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Snooping: It's not a crime, it's a feature

computerworld.com

Cellphone users say they want more privacy, and app makers are listening.

No, they're not listening to user requests. They're literally listening to the sounds in your office, kitchen, living room and bedroom.

A new class of smartphone app has emerged that uses the microphone built into your phone as a covert listening device -- a "bug," in common parlance.

But according to app makers, it's not a bug. It's a feature!

The apps use ambient sounds to figure out what you're paying attention to. It's the next best thing to reading your mind.

Your phone is listening

The issue was brought to the world's attention recently on a podcast called This Week in Tech. Host Leo Laporte and his panel shocked listeners by unmasking three popular apps that activate your phone's microphone to collect sound patterns from inside your home, meeting, office or wherever you are.

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Former Apple boss prosecuted for industrial espionage

In a move which has sent shockwaves around the mobile phone and computer technology world, it’s been reported that a former Apple boss was prosecuted for industrial espionage.

Paul Devine was global supply manager for Apple, but he sold the company’s secrets to Asian suppliers. This apparently gave the Asian businesses greater negotiating clout with Apple, and which adversely affected Apple’s costs.

A reporter told knowyourmobile.com: “Mr Devine admitted that the loss to Apple from his actions was more than £1.2m.”

Mr. Devine was arrested last August after incriminating emails were found on his computer. The emails appeared to show that he would be willing to provide information in return for being paid.

Paul Devine admitted charges of wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy and will be formally sentenced shortly.

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