Deutsche Telekom Scandal Could Spread to U.S.

on 28 May 2008, 12:34
by Cassimir Medford

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission could enter investigations into Deutsche Telekom over admissions it spied on phone calls to identify news leaks, according to a source on Wednesday.

The FCC could initiate its own action to see if DT’s “pretexting” extended to DT-owned T-Mobile USA, the No. 4 U.S. mobile carrier.

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Learning guide: The five steps of baseline Bluetooth security

Today over 3 million devices with Bluetooth ship every week, including computers, wireless car kits, PDAs and mobiles phones. And thanks to a range of vulnerabilities and exploits, extracting information from devices running Bluetooth can be relatively simple.As with all networking technologies, the mere presence of Bluetooth on a device introduces security risks, especially when the end user is unaware of Bluetooth’s presence, or of how to secure the technology. So, how can you protect your network from a Bluetooth hack? Here are five steps for securing Bluetooth devices in the enterprise.

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Cell phone, VoIP technologies lack security, experts say

PASADENA, Calif. — Be careful what you say over that mobile phone or VoIP system.

The most widely used mobile phone standard, GSM, is so insecure that it is easy to track peoples’ whereabouts and with some effort even listen in on calls, a security expert said late on Saturday at the LayerOne security conference.

“GSM security should be come more secure or at least people should know they shouldn’t be talking about (sensitive) things over GSM,” said David Hulton, who has cracked the encryption algorithm the phones use. “Somebody could possibly be listening over the line.”

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Sonera Shifting Email Services to Avoid Swedish Spy Laws

Sonera is shifting email services from servers located in Sweden for about half a million Finnish customers, the vast majority of them private individuals. It hopes to have the move completed by 8 AM Monday morning.

The move has been prompted by the Swedish government’s proposed law which would allow the National Defence Radio Establishment to intercept all electronic communications passing the national border.

Once services are relocated to Finland, emails between Finnish clients will not cross the border with Sweden and not be subject to possible legal interception by the Swedish military.

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Reports: Eavesdropping Attempt Made on Porsche Chief

German police have launched a probe after an attempt was made to eavesdrop on Porsche boss Wendelin Wiedeking while he was staying in a luxury hotel, German media are reporting.

Security staff from the the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Wolfsburg found a “babyphone” concealed under a sofa in his room, the media reports said, which had been turned on and was transmitting.

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FBI’s $500 Million Wiretap Retrofitting Fund Empty

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A 1994 law known as the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act or CALEA requires all telephone switches installed after 1995 to comply with detailed wiretapping rules, and Congress set aside a half billion dollars for the FBI to dole out to help carriers make older landline switches compliant.

Cell phone switches, however, are all compliant and nearly all FBI surveillance targets cell phones and pagers. In 2005, the feds got some 1800 criminal wiretap court orders, along with nearly 2,200 court orders for anti-terrorism and foreign intelligence wiretaps.

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Secret Data in FBI Wiretapping Audit Revealed with Ctrl-C

Once again, supposedly sensitive information blacked out from a government report turns out to be visible by computer experts armed with the Ctrl-C keys — and that information turns out to be not very sensitive after all.

Simply highlighting the redacted columnsin this table from an Inspector General report reveals some very un-sensitive information.
Image: Justice Department Inspector General Report

This time around, University of Pennsylvania professor Matt Blaze discovered that the Justice Department’s Inspector General’s office had failed to adequately obfuscate data in a March report (.pdf) about FBI payments to telecoms to make their legacy phone switches comply with 1995 wiretapping rules. That report detailed how the FBI had finished spending its allotted $500 million to help telephone companies retrofit their old switches to make them compliant with the Communications Assistance to LAw Enforcement Act or CALEA– even as federal wiretaps target cell phones more than 90 percent of the time.

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Govt may soon find BlackBerry solution

KOLKATA/NEW DELHI: The government may soon find a solution to the BlackBerry security issue. San Jose-based Cain Technologies and SS8 Networks will be demonstrating their interception equipment to the Department of Telecom (DoT) and Intelligence Bureau (IB) from Friday.

DoT sources said if the demonstrations are successful, the government will direct Canada’s RIM (the maker of BlackBerry smartphones) to install the interception solution on Indian mobile networks expeditiously.

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Who’s Listening To Your Calls?

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How To Make Your Phone Untappable

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So unencrypted VoIP is less secure than traditional telephony?

Vastly less secure. The traditional public telephone system that we’ve been using for the last hundred years is fairly well protected. It’s easy for the government to wiretap it by going to the phone company, but not easy for anyone else to wiretap it. If anyone else wanted to wiretap someone’s conversations, they’d have to find a place close to his or her office, get some alligator clips, and try to find the right wire out of thousands to clip them onto, and hope that nobody spots you doing it.

With VoIP, it’s not nearly so hard. All you just need is to take over a computer on the same network as the VoIP traffic with some spyware. That computer intercepts the VoIP conversations and stores them on a hard disk as .wav files that can be browsed later. A wiretapper could even choose to target the phone calls of a company’s general counsel talking to an outside law firm, or the CEO talking to his counterpart at another company.

It’s much easier because you don’t have to physically be there. You can be in China or Russia and target a company without obtaining a visa or entering the country you’re trying to infiltrate.

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