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Global articles on espionage, spying, bugs, and other interesting topics.

Keep abreast of the espionage threats facing your organisation.

Reports of IRA ‘bugging’ discounted

Magazine reports that the IRA had tapped into a secure line between Dundalk Garda Station and Newry police were discounted at the Smithwick Tribunal this morning.

Telecommunications engineer Tom Roddy who spent 37 years based in Dundalk said if the IRA had tapped the secure line by gaining access to the telephone in Dundalk “the evidence would be still there today”.

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Chinese National Pleads Guilty to Economic Espionage

A Chinese national has pleaded guilty to economic espionage for providing trade secrets from agricultural firms Dow and Cargill to the Chinese government.

Kexue Huang, pleaded guilty to one charge of economic espionage before a federal judge in Indiana, admitting that while he worked at Dow AgroSciences LLC and Cargill he obtained and transferred to China trade secrets from the companies. Huang was arrested and charged in an indictment in July 2010.

Huang worked for Dow from January 2003 to February 2008 and conducted research on an organic insecticide that was being developed by the company. The plea agreement filed in federal court in Indiana today asserted that between 2007 and 2010, Huang provided the Dow trade secrets to two people working for the Chinese government.

The court papers note that one of the unindicted co-conspirators was a Chinese exchange student studying at the Technical University in Dresden, Germany, who later moved to the Hunan Normal University in China.

“In stealing, transferring and using the trade secrets, Kexue Huang, a/k/a ‘John,’ intended to benefit Hunan Normal University, the national Natural Science Foundation and the 863 Program. Each of these entities is a foreign instrumentality of the People’s Republic of China,” the plea agreement said.

Program 863 is known as the “National High Technology Research and Development Program of China,” according to the indictment.

After working for Dow, Huang worked for Cargill and stole information relating to genetic information for enzymes used by the agricultural company.  Court papers unsealed today in Minnesota revealed the theft of trade secrets at Cargill.  The plea agreement estimates that Huang cost the two companies $7 million to $20 million in damages.

“We cannot allow U.S. citizens or foreign nationals to hand sensitive business information over to competitors in other countries, and we will continue our vigorous criminal enforcement of economic espionage and trade secret laws,” Lanny  Breuer head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division said in a statement. ” These crimes present a danger to the U.S. economy and jeopardize our nation’s leadership in innovation.”


Chinese Agricultural Researcher Charged Under Economic Espionage Act for Trade Secret Thefts at Dow and Cargilll

Why does China seem to be targeting Dow?

Following the 1996 enactment of the Economic Espionage Act, federal prosecutors state that eight cases have been brought charging violations of that law. On July 13, 2010, Kexue a/k/a “John” Huang, 48, a Chinese national who had been granted legal permanent resident status in the United States and a former resident of Carmel, Ind., was arrested in Westborough, MA and indicted on 17-counts in the Southern District of Indiana for misappropriating and transporting trade secrets to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) while working as a research scientist at Dow AgroSciences LLC.

On October 18, 2011, a separate indictment filed in the District of Minnesota was unsealed, charging Huang with stealing a trade secret from Cargill Inc.

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Nasdaq Attackers Eavesdropped on Board Directors With Web Monitoring Tool

The hackers who breached the Nasdaq stock exchange network last year had installed remote-monitoring
software that allowed them to spy on corporate directors, according to Reuters.

The unknown attackers were able to install the monitoring tool and steal confidential documents and
communications of board directors on the compromised platform, Reuters reported
Oct. 20.

Investigators have evidence that the attackers installed monitoring software and spied on
“scores” of directors who had logged on to directorsdesk.com, but did
not know how long the software was running on the network before it was detected
and removed last October.

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Does Facebook’s new ticker tell too much?

That new real-time ticker in the corner of your Facebook page seems innocent enough — hey, look, your cousin posted a picture of her puppy!

But listen closely and you could hear the sound of a massive privacy invasion. Introduced last week, the ticker announces what your friends — and friends of friends — are doing in real time. Every article they read, every song they listen to, every wall post and picture comment and status update — when they share it, you hear about it.

The ticker gives Facebook’s hundreds of millions of users up-to-the-second access to the personal lives of their contacts. To Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant from the security firm Sophos, that’s an invitation to disaster.

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