A study of German companies found that industrial spying is all but rampant and the spying involves companies in Germany and around the world.
The spying involved companies in China, Russia, the United States and elsewhere, said the study conducted by Corporate Trust, a security firm.
The study said nearly half of German companies report they have had company secrets stolen and 20 percent indicated they knew information was being hacked, but they did not know who was doing the spying.
The Local.de reported Monday the spying included some cloak and dagger strategies, including spies from the United States who used “special listening devices.”
The study of 600 firms said German companies would lose $5.5 billion in 2012 as a result of industrial spying.
Nearly 60 percent of the trade in industrial secrets is perpetrated by a member of a company’s own staff, but about half of the companies said they do not employ any specific strategy when staff members travel abroad.
”I FROZE, I didn’t know what to do, I felt trapped … I needed to get out to try to feel safe.”
This was how a female sailor on board HMAS Parramatta yesterday described her shock on January 2 this year when, drying herself after a shower, she glimpsed a mirror allegedly angled towards her from beneath the adjacent shower stall.
It was just after 7am and the ship was anchored off Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.
The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, told a navy court-martial in Sydney yesterday that as she had made her way into the bathroom she noticed Lieutenant James (”Jim”) McLaren shaving himself at a sink nearby.
At the time, they were the only occupants of the area which the navy calls the ”showers and heads”. She and Lieutenant McLaren had exchanged brief ”good mornings” before they both entered separate but adjoining shower stalls.
She had turned the water off after two or three minutes and was bent over, drying her lower legs, when she saw the mirror, which she testified was ”in the palm of a hand”, pointing in her direction.
She fled the cubicles and ran into Lieutenant Christopher Andersen, the ship’s medical officer, who had come in to use the sinks.
”She was in an acute distressed state,” Lieutenant Andersen told the hearing yesterday. ”She looked so distressed that I thought she had witnessed something quite terrible or catastrophic.”
”She said ‘Jim, Jim!’ … I thought he had committed suicide.”
Lieutenant McLaren is facing two charges before a military court presided over by Judge Advocate Jennifer Woodward.
He is charged with committing an act of indecency without consent, and as an alternative with acting in a manner likely to prejudice naval discipline.
He has pleaded not guilty.
Under cross examination by defending counsel, Major J. Lo Schiavo, the woman told the hearing she and Lieutenant McLaren had kissed in March last year after a social evening with other crew, but she had rebuffed his requests to pursue a relationship.
The case continues today.
In December, Lieutenant Commander John Alan Jones was convicted of seven charges of acts of indecency for repeatedly spanking a sailor on her bare bottom.
Online privacy is a hot issue. People expect to be able to surf the Web and use the Internet without compromising their privacy in the process, but the sites and services people use may be monitoring their online behavior. This may seem like an infringement of privacy to some, however, what they don’t realize is that they agreed to be watched.
The average Internet user visits more than 2,500 websites and online services per month. Virtually every one of them has a privacy policy of some sort. You might have to dig (a lot) to actually find it, but it’s there somewhere. By visiting the site or using the service you’re tacitly agreeing to the terms of the privacy policy whether you read it or not.
How many privacy policies have you read from beginning to end? Probably zero. One source reports that legal and tech researchers estimate it would take an entire month to read all of the privacy policies for the sites an average person visits in a year. Are you willing to invest that kind of time? Of course not.
Nobody is really–unless they’re a legal or tech researcher getting paid to do so–and the sites and services know that up front. They know that they can bury shady activity and surreptitious monitoring of online activity into the privacy policy because nobody is going to read it, and the use of the site or service signals your acceptance of the policy and gives silent consent for them to engage in spying on you.
In many cases, the information gathered isn’t even used by the site itself. It is collected as a side business and sold to third-party data brokers who then correlate and analyze the data to paint demographic pictures that can be marketed to advertisers, health insurers, and other entities.
Internet service providers, search engines, email services, and other online services may all be monitoring your online behavior. They know where you connect from, the type of device or operating system you use, whom you communicate with, the information you seek online, and the websites you visit. It’s OK that they collect such data, though; because you agreed to it when you accepted the privacy policy you didn’t read.
What should you do? Or–better yet–what can you do? Technically, you should read the privacy policies so you know what you’re getting into. That’s time consuming, and highly impractical, though.
Instead, try to limit your online activity to sites and services you trust. Those sites and services are most likely monitoring your activity to some extent as well, but a reputable website will use the information only for its own purposes to improve the experience for you as opposed to selling it to the highest bidder (or all of the bidders).
If you’d like to shield your online activity from spying, you can use the private browsing mode of your Web browser. All of the major browsers have an optional mode that prevents tracking cookies and wipes the browser history to conceal your online tracks.
China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile provider, applied in October for a license from the Federal Communications Commission to provide service between China and the United States and to build facilities on American soil.
Officials from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department’s national security division are concerned that the move would give the company access to physical infrastructure and Internet traffic that might allow China to spy more easily on the U.S. government and steal intellectual property from American companies, according to people familiar with the process who declined to be identified because the deliberations are secret.
Those officials, known collectively as “Team Telecom,” review FCC applications by foreign-owned companies. They could advise the FCC not to issue the license, but may instead demand a signed agreement designed to satisfy security concerns, the people said.
The review is being led by the Justice Department, which declined to comment, as did the FBI and DHS.
A move to block the license could provoke a lawsuit by China Mobile, officials said. But lately, the U.S. government’s focus on cyber espionage has sharpened considerably.
China Mobile, which has nearly 670 million subscribers, is not applying to provide domestic U.S. telephone or Internet service. But traffic from U.S. carriers, such as Verizon Communications Inc. or ATT Inc., could be routed to the China-owned network should a license be granted.
“Suddenly, you’ve got a perfect ability to exfiltrate information out of the country,” said Scott Aken, a former FBI cyber security investigator.
A U.S. representative for China Mobile, who declined to be quoted by name, said the company is cooperating with Team Telecom’s inquiries and expects to satisfy any concerns through a national security agreement. The firm declined to address allegations about Chinese spying.
Team Telecom’s review of China Mobile’s application is complicated by the fact that two other Chinese government-owned firms, China Telecom and China Unicom, were granted similar licenses in 2002 and 2003, respectively, well before Chinese cyber espionage was viewed as a pressing concern. Both carry phone and Internet traffic between the U.S. and China.
In neither case did Team Telecom require a national security agreement that specifies, for example, how the company must protect U.S. classified information that could traverse its network.
In recent years, Team Telecom has required foreign-owned firms to sign extremely detailed agreements.
One signed in September by Level 3 Communications, a Broomfield, Colo., carrier, requires the company to provide the manufacturer name and model number of all equipment relating to the undersea cables used to carry traffic to and from the United States. According to the FCC, 43.5 percent of the company is indirectly owned by foreign interests.
U.S. officials in recent months have warned repeatedly that cyber espionage, in some cases authorized at the highest levels of the Chinese government, has become a grave threat to U.S. economic and national security.
Tens of billions of dollars in U.S. intellectual property has been stolen, much of it through hacking originating in China, U.S. intelligence officials have said. In addition, China has obtained national defense information, the officials have said.
On April 8, 2010, China Telecom, China’s largest fixed-line telephone company, rerouted 15 percent of the world’s Internet’s traffic through Chinese servers for 18 minutes, according to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
China Telecom denied hijacking Internet traffic, but it did not explain how erroneous instructions were issued in a global Internet routing system based largely on trust.
In February 2011, the U.S. government blocked a deal by another Chinese telecom company, Huawei Technologies, to purchase 3Leaf Systems, an insolvent technology firm based in Santa Clara, Calif. Huawei is privately owned, but American officials alleged that it has ties to the Chinese military.
Last month, Australia barred Huawei from bidding for work on its national broadband network because of security concerns. Also last month, Symantec Corp. unwound its joint venture with Huawei, reportedly over concerns that the U.S. government would stop sharing information with Symantec.
The House intelligence committee is investigating the role of Chinese telecommunications companies in espionage, with a focus on Huawei and ZTE Corp., which makes switches, routers and other products.
Sean McGurk, a former senior DHS cyber security official, said China Mobile’s entrance into the U.S. market “would pose a concern to most people. We’re not really sure, not only where the information is flowing, but what potentially is being left behind.”
Two Russian Embassy staff in Ottawa have left Canada in the wake of spying allegations against a Canadian naval officer in Halifax, but there’s little else that’s clear about the murky espionage case.
Intelligence experts and those in close contact with the embassy disagree on whether any Russian diplomats engage in spying, leaving Canadians to try to piece together what bits are public.
Initial media reports said up to four Russian Embassy staff had been removed from a list of embassy and diplomatic staff recognized by Canada. CBC News has confirmed that two have had their credentials revoked since news broke of the naval officer’s arrest, while two diplomats left the country a month or more before the arrest this week of Canadian Sub.-Lt. Jeffrey Paul Delisle.
Another report pointed to two other staff who are no longer accredited to be in Canada. It’s not clear which of the staff have been expelled over the spying allegations.
Konstantin Kolpakov, a former aide to the ambassador, was scheduled to leave Canada on Dec. 25 because his posting was over, and had a send-off attended by diplomats in Ottawa mid-month.
Kolpakov and Fedorchatenko were known to circulate around the diplomatic scene in the capital, attending functions with other foreign representatives, Canadian diplomats and journalists.
Two others, Mikhail Nikiforov and Tatiana Steklova, were listed as administrative and technical staff until Jan. 19 but are no longer on a list of accredited diplomats on the website of the Department of Foreign Affairs.
A report in the Russian media Friday quoted the country’s foreign ministry as saying it was surprised to see Canadian media reports about the expulsions. The report says the embassy staff left at the end of 2011 because their rotations were ending.
A woman who answered the phone at the Russian Embassy in Ottawa refused to comment on the departures.
Public Safety Minister Vic Toews refused to comment on a national security matter, but did say: “I’m not aware of why those individuals left Canada.”
Russian diplomatic staff usually do two- or three-year postings at the embassy before returning home or going on to a posting in another country. Read More
