The office of Victorian Deputy Premier Peter Ryan is refusing to comment on reports an adviser to the minister has been under surveillance by the police watchdog.
A ministerial adviser to Mr Ryan has been named in reports in The Age and Herald Sun newspapers as a target of surveillance by the Office of Police Integrity (OPI).
Mr Ryan, also Police Minister, is on compassionate leave from parliament and was unable to be contacted on Saturday, but his spokeswoman said the OPI operated without influence by politicians.
“Matters to do with the OPI are strictly matters for the OPI,” she said.
“They have the powers they have, they do as they do, we are outside of that process,” the spokeswoman said.
The OPI on Friday admitted they had Sir Ken Jones, one of Victoria’s most senior policeman, under surveillance following complaints.
A media report had earlier revealed the surveillance was underway, and Sir Ken’s wife and supporters had also been targeted.
Sir Ken had a rocky relationship with the police Chief Commissioner, Simon Overland.
Mr Overland forced Sir Ken to go on leave three months early after Sir Ken announced his resignation in May.
Victoria’s Police Association has said Mr Overland used his friendship with OPI’s deputy director, Paul Jevtovic, to influence the OPI to commence the investigation.
It is thought the ministerial adviser allegedly bugged by the OPI was a supporter of Sir Ken.
Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International and former editor of The Sun, has been shown evidence suggesting her phone was hacked more than 20 times by a private investigator employed by another Rupert Murdoch title, it emerged last night.
News International confirmed the 43-year-old media executive met detectives last week from Operation Weeting – Scotland Yard’s third investigation into phone hacking – to see records showing she was targeted by Glenn Mulcaire, the private detective employed by the News of the World to eavesdrop on the voicemails of numerous public figures.
The alleged hacking took place between 2005 and 2006, when Ms Brooks, who is also a former editor of the NOTW, was in charge of The Sun, and raises the question of whether Mr Mulcaire was at the centre of an effort by Britain’s top-selling Sunday newspaper to spy on its daily stablemate.
The revelation that Ms Brooks was a likely repeated target for Mr Mulcaire was made by Sky News, whose largest shareholder is Mr Murdoch’s News Corp. In a blog, the broadcaster’s City editor, Mark Kleinman, suggested the hacking could also have been done by the private investigator on behalf of a rival newspaper.
Before his arrest in August 2006, Mr Mulcaire was employed on an exclusive contract with the NOTW worth ÂŁ104,000 a year to supply “research and information services”. No evidence has been produced to show that the amateur footballer-turned-private detective was working for titles outside News International.
The reason why Ms Brooks, who edited The Sun between 2003 and 2009, had her voicemails intercepted was unclear, though she became the subject of media interest in her personal life in November 2005 when she was arrested for an alleged assault on her then-husband, the actor Ross Kemp. She was released without charge.
Sky News reported that legal advisers to the News International chief executive, who has always denied any knowledge of phone hacking, were considering whether to apply for a court order requiring the Yard to hand over copies of the evidence found in Mr Mulcaire’s documents.
A News International spokeswoman said: “We can confirm that Rebekah Brooks was recently shown documents by the police that proved she was a victim of illegal voicemail interception.” It was unclear last night whether Ms Brooks would consider joining the list of high-profile individuals suing the NOTW for breach of privacy.
In a sign that the revelations may be damaging Mr Murdoch’s popularity, it appears his annual summer party is no longer the hot ticket it used to be. As the media mogul stands on the verge of achieving his dream of taking complete control of the BSkyB satellite broadcasting empire, an invitation to last night’s grand bash at the ornate Orangery, in the grounds of Kensington Palace, west London, drew more refusals than acceptances.
The Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, who is set to announce whether the BSkyB deal can go through, has decided not to attend the party for fear that his presence might be misinterpreted. His colleague Ed Vaizey, the Culture minister, is also expected to be give it a miss. Liberal Democrat MPs, who attended in strength with Nick Clegg last year, are also likely to be conspicuously absent as the parliamentary party is attending an annual away day.
The Independent understands the event was also expected to be less star-studded than in previous years. Downing Street would not confirm whether David Cameron was attending, as he did last year with his wife, Samantha.
A team of quantum cryptography researchers from Singapore and Norway have managed to eavesdrop on a communication that was encrypted by quantum key distribution (QKD) without being detected.
QKD is one variety of quantum cryptography, and is probably the most well known. In a nutshell, a communication encrypted by QKD is one where both the sender (known in the literature as “Alice”) and the receiver (“Bob”). Like the most common encryption protocol used today, public-key encryption, QKD relies on electronic “keys” to decrypt messages sent back and forth between Alice and Bob. In public-key encryption, the keys are very large prime numbers, which are difficult to current computers to calculate and determine through brute force.
In QKD, the key is actually in the form of stream of photons, where each photon consists of one bit of information about the key, depending on the photon’s state. In theory, this would prevent an eavesdropper (“Eve”) from breaking into the communication, because the very act of Eve trying to measure the state of the photons will actually change their state. That change would enable Bob and Alice to know that Eve was trying to listen in on their conversation, and also prevent Eve from obtaining the complete key.
In practice, however, this has turned out to be more difficult, due to the physical limitations of a QKD system. This has enabled several successful attacks on QKD systems, including the ability of Eve to obtain the key and listen to the communications. However, all of these methods still introduce some errors into the communcations and key receptions, meaning that it’s possible for Alice and Bob to notice the eavesdropping and act accordingly.
The researchers at the University of Singapore, however, have managed to go one step further — they’ve developed a method of producing a full exploit of a QKD system that allows for Eve to eavedrop on Alice’s and Bob’s communication — without introducing enough errors to allow her to be detected. Her eavesdropping appeared to be no different from the random background errors that are inevitable in the physical implementation of a QKD system.
Although the researchers were able to infiltrate this system with basically off-the-shelf parts, it’s worth noting that this exploit doesn’t mean that QKD isn’t a viable method of encryption. The researchers themselves suggest several countermeasures, and no doubt other countermeasures will be developed as this research continues. As the researchers themselves note: ”a more pointed question is what problems still lurk unnoticed in the gap between the theoretical description and the practical systems. Just as in classical cryptography, an ongoing search for backdoors is required to build hardened implementations of quantum cryptography for real-world use.”
Quantum cryptography is still in its infancy, but it’s still more than likely the future of encrypted communications once its been further refined and developed.
THE chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s News International has been shown police evidence revealing that her voicemail was repeatedly hacked by a private investigator employed by one of the company’s newspapers.
The Independent last night reported that News International confirmed the 43-year-old media executive Rebekah Brooks met Metropolitan Police detectives last week to see records showing she was targeted by Glenn Mulcaire, the private detective employed by News International’s Sunday tabloid News of the World to eavesdrop on the voicemails of numerous public figures.
According to The Independent, the alleged hacking took place between 2005 and 2006, when Ms Brooks, who is also a former editor of the News of the World, was in charge of The Sun.
She became the subject of media interest in her personal life in November 2005 when she was arrested for an alleged assault on her then husband, actor Ross Kemp. She was released without charge.
The revelation that Ms Brooks was a likely repeated target for Mr Mulcaire was first made by Sky News, whose largest shareholder is Mr Murdoch’s News Corporation. Mr Murdoch is in London to attend a company board meeting.
The company’s shareholders and non-executive directors are believed to be concerned about the way the hacking affair has been handled by Mr Murdoch’s London lieutenants.
Three News of the World journalists have been arrested since the Metropolitan Police reopened its inquiry into the claims.
The Met’s original inquiry into the practice led to the conviction of NOTW royal editor Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire in 2007.
A Manchester United footballer is the latest high-profile figure to sue the Murdoch tabloid for breach of privacy, claiming that his mobile phone messages were intercepted by journalists working for the paper.
Ryan Giggs has begun legal proceedings against the tabloid and Mulcaire over the phone hacking.
Scotland Yard, which is investigating multiple claims that NOTW staff hacked into the voicemail messages of celebrities and politicians, would not comment on the cases of either Ms Brooks or Giggs.
Actress Sienna Miller was last week awarded ÂŁ100,000 ($A153,810) damages at London’s High Court after bringing a privacy and harassment claim in connection with the NOTW‘s phone-hacking action.
Other well-known figures said to have been victims of mobile phone message hacking include actor Jude Law, former prime minister Gordon Brown, ex-footballer Paul Gascoigne and comedian Steve Coogan.
It’s easy to eavesdrop on people using the popular mobile messenger WhatsApp. The application sends user names, telephone numbers and even complete instant messages unencrypted over the internet. Adversaries can intercept this information by using a simple network sniffer like the popular Wireshark.
A reader of the Dutch IDG publication Webwereld discovered this vulnerability. He was able to intercept all unencrypted traffic on a network and Webwereld was able to reproduce his findings. At first sight, it looks like WhatsApp is using an SSL secured HTTPS connection to their servers. But this can be falsified on closer inspection. Although all usernames, telephone numbers and all instant messages are transferred via port 443, which is reserved for encrypted traffic, they are sent to WhatsApp’s servers in plain text.
Because of this it’s easy to ascertain private information by using a man-in-the-middle attack. The attack can only be carried out when a smartphone using WhatsApp is connected to an unsecured wireless network, like for instance WiFi hotspots offered at train stations or airports.
Adversaries could also setup a wifi access point with a common SSID of an unencrypted wireless network. This is know as an evil twin network. If the malicious user forwards the requests of the app to the internet, it’s even easier to capture private information. People using only trusted or secured WiFi networks are probably less vulnerable to this attack.
In a statement, WhatsApp says that it “strongly believes in network freedom and privacy” of their users. The company is studying this issue closely but does not wish to comment at this time.
To the discoverer of the vulnerability the company tells a different story. In this comment, WhatsApp states it trusts on 3G and WiFi to protect the traffic. “We do not save or store address book data or your conversations, so there is nothing to encrypt,” a spokeswoman said.
