WikiLeaks 'surprised' by scale of US espionage

cnn.com

(CNN) -- WikiLeaks, the whistle-blower website sitting on a giant trove of U.S. diplomatic cables, didn't expect the papers to reveal as much espionage as they apparently do, a spokesman said Monday.

"I was surprised at (the) extent of the spying," Kristinn Hrafnsson told CNN.

The leaked papers include what seems to be an order from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to American diplomats to engage in intelligence-gathering.

Clinton directed her envoys at embassies around the world to collect information ranging from basic biographical data on diplomats to their frequent flyer and credit card numbers, and even "biometric information on ranking North Korean diplomats."

Typical biometric information includes fingerprints, signatures, and iris recognition data.

The cable, simply signed 'CLINTON', is classified S/NF - or 'Secret/No Foreign' - and was sent to 33 embassies and the U.N. mission offices in New York, Vienna, and Rome.

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Turkish eavesdroppers get name right, number wrong

hurriyetdailynews.com

A case of mistaken identity led to the wiretapping for many months of a Turkish construction worker with the same name as a military colonel accused of attempting to stage a coup, daily Hürriyet reported Thursday.

According to the paper, it took the police months to realize it was tapping the phone of the wrong Dursun Çiçek.

Daily Hürriyet called the phone number listed on the first two court orders authorizing surveillance of Col. Dursun Çicek on suspicion of plotting a coup. The paper reported that the man who answered was a construction worker who had no idea that his conversations were being monitored.

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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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