Detective agency ‘paid to spy’
Detective agency ‘paid to spy’
The firm is accused of phone tapping and computer hacking |
A private detective firm earned tens of thousands of pounds by hacking into people’s computers and bugging telephones, a court has heard.
Active Investigation Services (AIS) had a number of “lucrative sidelines” under the title “Hackers Are Us”, Southwark Crown Court was told.
These included using “Trojan” viruses to enter computers and hi-tech devices to bug phones, the prosecution claimed.
Five men associated with the agency deny a total of 15 charges.
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Tapping into fibre optic cables is very easy
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North American National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) views that tapping into fibre optic cables is a widespread method of industrial espionage. According to information provided by the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), fibre optic transmission paths pose a real threat in terms of security. Data encryption is thus an absolute must. However, only the armaments’ industry has been furnished with legal regulations. Nothing has been done to address the security issues that affect enterprises and government authorities. Recently, credit card companies are now insisting that ‘members, merchants and service providers that store, process or transmit cardholder data become ‘PCI compliant’ by Encrypting the transmission of cardholder data across open, public networks.
Protect fibre optic networks using encryption
Whether from financial institutes, insurance companies, pharmaceutical and chemical industries or public administrations, if the integrity, confidentiality and authenticity of information is not 100% guaranteed, the consequences to a breach can be of immeasurable proportions. Encryption today is the recognised as ‘the best practice’ in-order to protect against compromises of this nature.
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Does source code availability mean a more secure product?
Short answer: not necessarily.
Does the company provide all the code needed to compile the voice encryption product I can then install in my mobile phone or the one they include in the firmware of the phone they provide? If the answer is no, how do I know that the code they provide me for review is the same one they used to produce the software they installed in the phone? My understanding is that there is no way to verify that.
But even if the source code they are providing for review is the same one they used to compile their product, can’t the security be compromised by how their solution was implemented on the specific phone? Does it make sense to verify the encryption algorithm if I cannot make sure the other processes involved in securing my calls, including but not limited to voice de-coding and interaction with the phone OS, are also secure and free of programming errors or back-doors?
And who is reviewing the code? Is there any incentive to do it? Are good an honest people investing their time in reviewing source code published by second tier vendors? Probably not. That the code is available does not necessarily mean that it is reviewed.
The other day I stumbled upon the web site of a company selling voice encryption products, and I sadly read their conclusion of why other vendors may not be offering their source code for review. They state they can only assume that the other vendors have something to hide, or that they may be afraid of competition, or trying to protect “so called” “trade secrets.” How sad is that?
In relation to protecting their “trade secrets,” I hope that’s true. My understanding is that trade secret protection lasts for as long as the secret is kept confidential.
Also, what do they mean by “so called trade secrets”? If it means they have a strong position against intellectual property protection, fine. But then the question would be why are they not just releasing the software as open source? Could that impact their “so called bottom line”?
In their web site they also state that they “have no (trade) secrets”. Really?
(written by uzimanu on 4/26/2007)
Who’s Reading Your Cell’s Text Messages?
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Misplaced “Call Mom” messages aren’t likely to harm anyone, but by late 2004, the unsolicited SMS problem exploded, and took on a darker nature, as mobile data services started popping up all over to take advantage of a new generation of feature-rich mobile phones, Bubrouski said.
“I was getting people’s grades, order information from unknown retailers, personal messages with people’s credit card numbers [and] social security
numbers,” he wrote.
Most of the messages were sent by individuals, but many arrived in volume from companies like eMbience Inc. of San Diego, Calif., which unwittingly sent reams of MapQuest Traffic data to Bubrouski’s phone.
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Messages from both the Princeton Review Service and Pill Phone were accidentally sent to Bubrouski’s phone because of a flaw in a sharing feature in the service that allows test results completed on the phone to automatically be forwarded in SMS or e-mail format to a third party such as a parent or tutor, he said.
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Text Messaging Booms at U.S. Colleges
Text Messaging Booms at U.S. Colleges Wayne Rash
April 20, 2007
News Analysis: The rush to more efficiently send out emergency text messages to students at universities has been intensified by the Virginia Tech shootings.
Why your next phone will be a wallet
April 02, 2007 (Computerworld) — I carry only the essentials in my wallet: a Starbucks debit card, California driver’s license, a few credit cards, two ATM cards, a Costco card, business cards, a AAA card and some cash.
I try to avoid George Wallet Syndrome. But it seems that every electronics superstore, bookstore, grocery store and department store I shop in wants me to carry yet another card (either as a credit card or some kind of “membership” card that gives me a discount). If I accepted every offer, the stack of cards I carried would probably be three inches high. So I always say “no” to these cards.
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DuPont spy case hints at Chinese connection
Communist government implicated in similar thefts
Posted Friday, March 2, 2007
China has been called the United States’ primary adversary in economic espionage.Of the three cases of foreign economic espionage brought since a 1996 law was created, two have directly implicated China.
A half-dozen more involving the less serious crime of theft of trade secrets have had a Chinese connection, but no proof that information was funneled to the Chinese government.
The recent case against Gary Younggang Min, whose guilty plea to stealing $400 million in trade secrets from the DuPont Co. was unsealed last month, certainly hints that it could be part of that trend.
Editor jailed in UK royal wiretap scandal
London (dpa) – The editor of one of Britain’s leading tabloid newspapers resigned Friday after a top royal reporter was jailed for four months for illegally tapping into more than 600 mobile phone messages of aides of the royal family.
Andy Coulson, who has been editor of the News of the World, a Sunday tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, since 2003, said he took responsibility for the “scandal” over phone interception.
TIPSHEET: Think that conversation from your office phone is private? Think again
Vanderbilt professor says Wal-Mart case calls attention to employer’s right to eavesdrop on employee calls.
News reports that a Wal-Mart employee taped telephone conversations between a New York Times reporter and other Wal-Mart employees brings to light the practice of corporations who require employees to consent to company surveillance of calls made through company systems and equipment. Wal-Mart officials have said the employee in the recently reported case was not authorized to make the recordings and added that company policy restricts monitoring of employee communications to instances in which fraud or criminal activity is suspected. However, that policy is not a requirement. “We know from recent surveys by groups such as the American Management Association and others that many firms do routinely monitor employee communications that employees might think is private, without cause of suspicion,” says Bruce Barry, professor of management and sociology. “This means workers, especially in the private sector, work under the threat that their expressive activity is being watched, which has the effect of chilling free expression that might have nothing to do with the corporation, or that might involve whistleblowing regarding corporate misbehavior.”
Empresa USA espía las comunicaciones de mexicanos (Spanish)
Intercepción de comunicación se podrá realizar si policia de USA o PGR lo ordenan. (AP)
5/3/2007 | EFE
El diario ‘El Centro’, que salió a circulación, denunció que una empresa de USA está supuestamente autorizada para intervenir todo tipo de comunicaciones que se efectúen en la red de telefonía de México.
El rotativo asegura que la compañía estadounidense Verint Technology Inc. tiene un contrato para escuchar conversaciones, leer correos electrónicos, navegar páginas de internet e intervenir llamadas de celular en cualquier parte de México si la policía federal de USA (FBI, en inglés) o a la Procuraduría General de la República de México (PGR) lo ordenan.El nuevo rotativo reproduce el anuncio del ganador de una licitación de ‘Intercepción de comunicaciones en México’ publicada en un sitio de internet del Departamento de Estado de USA y que fue adjudicada a Verint Technology.
Según el diario esta firma realizará sus actividades desde la sede de la Subprocuraduría de Investigaciones Especializadas en Delincuencia Organizada (SIEDO), que depende de la PGR (fiscalía), desde el barrio capitalino de Guerrero.
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