I give spy coins to my clients.It is a reminder that information loss is mostly a people problem, not an electronic problem. Filing cabinets of information can walk out the door in pocket change!
Careless people often blab information, forget to secure it, toss it in the garbage can, or otherwise lose it—hundreds of laptops are lost every day. People also steal it when they become greedy, spiteful, conned, blackmailed, or caught up in a “cause.”
Investigating an information loss, however, begins with an electronic surveillance detection audit.
Here’s why…
• Serious espionage will include electronic surveillance.
• The possibility must be resolved before accusing people.
• Bugging is the easiest spy technique to discover.
• Electronic surveillance evidence helps prove your case.
Best advice… Conduct audits on a regular basis. Uncover signs of espionage during the intelligence collection stage, before your information can be abused. (more)
A client reports back…
“I think of all of the trinket type things we’ve accumulated over the years, the spy coin is *by far* the coolest, and is made even cooler with the background story provided on the chip!!
I took mine with me to the FBI building today and had the guards there X-ray it along-side of a normal quarter to see if its secret contents could be seen on an “airport quality” X ray machine. They printed out a copy of the scan image, I’ve attached it to this email for your amusement as well.
Several agents commented on how well it was made, and how hard it would be to detect such a thing.“
OH – The former state lawyer behind an electronic eavesdropping scheme agreed yesterday to plead guilty to three misdemeanor charges and cooperate in other investigations, including one into an aborted operation at the Governor’s Residence.
Joshua Engel, the former chief legal counsel for the Ohio Department of Public Safety, faces three misdemeanor counts of intercepting and disclosing sensitive, confidential information from investigations by the state inspector general, the Ohio Ethics Commission and federal authorities. (
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The down side of social not-working…
Many of the most popular applications, or “apps,” on the social-networking site Facebook Inc. have been transmitting identifying information—in effect, providing access to people’s names and, in some cases, their friends’ names—to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.
The issue affects tens of millions of Facebook app users, including people who set their profiles to Facebook’s strictest privacy settings. (more)
PA –
A suburban Pennsylvania school district accused of spying on students using school-issued laptops has agreed to pay $610,000 to settle litigation stemming from its controversial practice.
Under the proposed settlement, the Lower Merion School District will pay $185,000 to two high school students who had sued the district earlier this year for allegedly snooping on them.
The remaining $425,000 will go to attorneys fees. (
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Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania say they’ve discovered a way to circumvent the networking technology used by law enforcement to tap phone lines in the U.S.
The flaws they’ve found “represent a serious threat to the accuracy and completeness of wiretap records used for both criminal investigation and as evidence in trial,” the researchers say in their paper, set to be presented Thursday at a computer security conference in Chicago.
Following up on earlier work on evading analog wiretap devices called loop extenders, the Penn researchers took a deep look at the newer technical standards used to enable wiretapping on telecommunication switches. They found that while these newer devices probably don’t suffer from many of the bugs they’d found in the loop extender world, they do introduce new flaws. In fact, wiretaps could probably be rendered useless if the connection between the switches and law enforcement are overwhelmed with useless data, something known as a denial of service (DOS) attack. (more)
“I think of all of the trinket type things we’ve accumulated over the years, the spy coin is *by far* the coolest, and is made even cooler with the background story provided on the chip!!
