*Upon private request, the personal details of those involved in this matter were removed in 2016*
2010
A jealous husband confessed to his wife that he had bugged her phone because he wrongly suspected her
of having an affair. A successful businessman, was sued by his now ex-wife and agreed to pay her a five-figure out-of-court settlement. But last week, on the day the payment was due, he filed for bankruptcy and now she may never see a penny of the money she is owed.
The couple met through relatives in 1997 and married two years later. But wedded bliss soon gave way to his jealousy and insecurity, according to his wife.
She said she became an âopen bookâ in an effort to make her husband, who was a director and share-holder at his familyâs company, feel more secure.
However, in 2008 he sat her down at their home in West Midlands, and told her he had been recording all her phone calls for six months and played her a CD of conversations with family and friends.
âI was completely shocked,â she said.
âI asked him why and he didnât really have an answer for me. It just comes back to the fact that he was insecure. Maybe he was trying to get something on me having an affair, but there wasnât one.â
The wife, then, 34, described that moment as âthe straw that broke the camelâs backâ following years of being questioned about her every move.
The sales manager ended their marriage and sued her husband at the High Court for breach of confidence and misuse of private information. She claimed her ex-husband, then 36, violated her privacy and ruined her career after relaying the recordings to relatives and friends.
At the High Court, he denied tracking his wife, disputing that he had bugged her phone. He did, however, concede that he had told her that he had done so.
However, the two legal teams agreed the undisclosed settlement after the hearing in July. The wife said that she has not seen any money and now fears she never will.
Her solicitor said: âWe believe that [the husband] disposed of substantial assets by transferring shares to other individuals before declaring himself bankrupt.
âWe will pursue further court action if necessary after considering the report from the Official Receiver.â
How can you âhum-bugâ proofed your holidays? Identity thieves are the new Ebenezers of the season. They are stealing your identity by preying on your festive holiday spirit. Whether it is at a house party or an office party, you need to be alert. What takes a second to steal will take years to fix.
The Colo Bureau of Investigation says you shouldâŠ
Travel light-Donât take every credit card known to mankind with you when you go holiday shopping; also photocopy the ones you do take with and leave those copies at home.
Keep purse/wallet with you-Donât leave your wallet or purse in the coat room or on a bed in a room that you canât see who has access to it.
If youâre having a holiday house party, donât leave your personal information out in the open (that includes your laptop). Also, lock your car as it contains your personal information as well.
To catch a criminal, sometimes you have to think like one.
So researchers on the trail of cybercrooks that use armies of infected computers, known as botnets, to send out spam e-mail or to attack websites are building botnets of their own. Fortunately, the new approach is being tested using a high-powered computing cluster that is safely isolated from the Internet.
“We set up what we thought would be the closest to a botnet in the wild,” says Pierre-Marc Bureau, a researcher with computer security firm ESET, part of the project led by a team at Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal with collaborators at Nancy University, France, and Carlton University, Canada. “To our knowledge, this is the first such realistic experiment,” he says.
Over 3,000 copies of Windows XP were installed on a cluster of 98 servers at Ecole Polytechnique. Each virtual computer system was wrapped in software that linked it up to the others as if it were an individual computer connected to the Internet or a local network. Every system was also infected with the Waledac worm, a piece of now well understood and largely vanquished software that at the start of 2010 was estimated by Microsoft to control hundreds of thousands of computers and to send out 1.5 billion spam messages a day.
The team mimicked the control structure needed to take charge of a Waledac botnet, in which a central command-and-control server sends orders to a handful of bots that then spread those instructions to other machines.
In recent years, researchers have developed techniques to eavesdrop on live botnet communications and even to inject messages into these communications. Building a complete botnet in an experimental environment allows much more freedom, though, says Bureau. “When you experiment on a live botnet, you may provoke a bad reaction from its owner that harms infected machines,” he explains, and then “you are also potentially controlling the machines of innocent users, which has ethical and legal problems.”
Having their own botnet also gave the researchers the luxury of being able to observe it inside and out as it operated normally or was attacked by someone trying to disable the network, and also to run multiple trials that yielded statistically significant results.
It was, Bureau says, something of a challenge to convince the owner of a cluster worth around $1 million that installing malware onto it was a good idea.
The Lebanese army has said it has dismantled two Israeli spy systems planted in the mountains above Beirut.
The army said it was alerted to the long-range surveillance devices by the Shia Islamist movement, Hezbollah. One of the devices bore writing in Hebrew.
Meanwhile, an explosion in the southern port of Sidon late on Wednesday sparked reports of a possible Israeli attempt to destroy a third device there.
Israel denied any involvement, saying there had been “no unusual activity”.
Fake rocks
On Wednesday, the Lebanese army released a statement saying troops had located two sophisticated, Israeli-made surveillance devices in the mountains of Sannine and Barouk, north and south of the capital, Beirut.
Pictures on the army website showed devices concealed inside large fake rocks on the slopes of the mountains.
The system found in Sannine included a camera, a device to send images and a third to receive signals, the army said.
The device found in Barouk was “more complicated”, it added.
The army urged citizens to inform it about any suspicious objects they found
The system was placed at a height of 1,715m and made up of two artificial boulders.
One boulder contained equipment for transmitting and receiving signals, which covered the towns of the western and central Bekaa Valley – a Hezbollah stronghold – towns in southern Lebanon, and parts of Syria.
It had the ability to communicate with wireless transmission stations in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, the army said.
The other boulder contained a large number of batteries which would have provided power for the equipment for a number of years, it added.
One picture showed a device bearing the words “mini cloud” in Hebrew, along with the name of the manufacturer – “Beam Systems Israel Ltd” – in English.
One picture showed a device bearing the words “mini cloud” in Hebrew
The army said it planned to remove the cameras and urged citizens to inform authorities about any suspicious objects they found.
Earlier this month, Hezbollah said it had discovered an Israeli device spying on its private telecommunications network.
In a speech late on Wednesday, Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah said underground Israeli spy radars were sending pictures “day and night”.
He told supporters that Hezbollah was ready to fight any Israeli attack on Lebanese sovereignty, despite internal divisions over a UN-backed tribunal investigating the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
More than 100 people in Lebanon have been arrested since last year on suspicion of collaborating with Israel.
Hezbollah fought a 34-day war against Israel in 2006 that left 1,200 Lebanese and 160 Israelis dead. Lebanon and Israel remain officially in a state of war.
Israel and the US have accused Syria of helping Hezbollah rearm. Earlier this year, Damascus denied it was supplying Scud missiles to the group.
If you really want to know why the project you and your team just put six months of your life into ended in disaster, this guy can help.
Peter Earnest is a former CIA spy master who knows how to get information from people or – as he and his co-author call it – use elicitation techniques. Which is a nice way of describing the science of interrogation by way of conversation.
In their new book “Business Confidential: Lessons for Corporate Success from Inside the CIA,” Earnest, who worked for the CIA 36 years and is now executive director of the International Spy Museum, and business writer Maryann Karinch, explain how techniques of our national espionage and intelligence services apply to business success.
The section on gathering intelligence and collecting information on people gets to the heart of getting to the bottom of who did what and what was said. The authors offer up verbatim psychological approaches that may be more productive than the typical post-mortem meeting taking place in companies every day.
Perhaps these approaches which involve “flattery, criticism and using the leverage of someone’s emotions” can be put to work in your office.
For instance, if you are a manager trying to get to the bottom of why the deal of the century fell apart, instead of “Who dropped the ball on this?” you might try “direct questioning” which would sound like this: “What signs did you notice that the deal was falling apart?”
Or there’s the “emotional appeal”: “Your concern for your team has always been evident, so just do what’s best for them. Tell me what went wrong so everyone can learn from it.”
There’s always the when all-else-fails “futility” proposition: “I don’t see any way for you to get out of this mess without your career taking a hit. Why don’t you tell me what happened with the project. Maybe I can make some sense of it.”
The “fear down” overture: “You seem very upset about the failure of the project. Don’t worry. Just calm down and we’ll figure this out and fix the problems.”
The “pride and ego down” approach: “I think you’ve been slipping lately, but maybe other members of the team are making you look bad. Tell me exactly what happened with this project.”
Or the “we know all” position: “A few of the team members have sent me e-mails about the project, so I have a pretty good idea of what went on. Tell me what you think happened here.”
The “silence” approach: “Have a seat. Let’s talk about the project.” Then you say nothing, waiting for the person to start blurting things out. Yes, silence is that awkward.
Your technique for obtaining information in business “will be shaped by whether you want an operational relationship or just a quick bit of information from someone you may never see again,” the authors say.
For example, you can simply throw someone a bone – which is giving information to get it. I must say, I find this technique a bit underhanded. Nonetheless, it goes like this:
You say, “There was a proposal talked about at such-and-such meeting” – knowing darn well the proposal was shot down. But you don’t mention that fact.
“When you talk about something that seems to be confidential, that sense of quid pro quo often takes hold,” they say.
Sneaky stuff? Perhaps. But these techniques, based on an understanding of human nature, can get to information without being threatening. Which goes to show that the intelligence mindset used in the world of espionage can also have value in the world of business.
Andrea Kay is the author of “Work’s a Bitch and Then You Make It Work: 6 Steps to Go From Pissed Off to Powerful.” Send questions to her at 2692 Madison Road, #133, Cincinnati, OH 45208; www.andreakay.com or www.lifesabitchchangecareers.com. She can be e-mailed at: andrea [at] andreakay [dot] com.
