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.
A cybersecurity consulting firm has documented the existence of a China-based espionage operation that has infiltrated the
computer systems of at least 22 organizations in the government and private sectors in the U.S., Europe and Asia.
But the biggest surprise was how the compromised entities reacted when notified of the breach by e-mails, which were followed
up by phone calls.
“Not a single company actually responded. No one said ‘thank you,’ no one said give me more information, how did you do this,
nothing,” Adam Vincent, chief executive of Cyber Squared, said Tuesday. “Either we notified the wrong people or people didn’t
care. I’m not sure which.”
Cyber Squared won’t disclose the names of the organizations that seemed to ignore what the firm found to be a sophisticated
attack, most likely sanctioned or sponsored by some entity within China.
The victims included U.S. public policy think tanks, North American technology companies, European food safety, environmental
and maritime organizations, East Asian economic policy and diplomacy groups, and international mining organizations and law
firms. What was stolen from these organizations is not known.
The reason Cyber Squared believes the attacks were state sanctioned or sponsored is because all the victims were tied to Chinese
strategic interests. For example, one organization was involved with efforts in the U.S. government to sell F-16 fighter jets
to Taiwan, an action China opposed. Another was involved with efforts in the United Nations to minimize greenhouse gas emissions
within the international maritime industry.
In many ways, the operation was a classic example of what the security industry calls an advanced persistent threat, which
means the attackers studied each organization closely in order to tailor the attack to specific people. The cyber criminals
constantly updated the malware used in order to hide from antivirus software and other security technology found on most organizations’
networks.
Cyber Squared was introduced to the espionage operation in September 2011, when an organization connected to the Taiwan discussions
received e-mail with an address that closely resembled the name of a senior executive. The missive, sent from a popular U.S.
Web mail service, contained a link to a Web site that directed the victim to download a malicious file. The e-mail was sent
within 32 hours after Congress received a bill that would authorize the jet sale to Taiwan.
The simplicity of the original e-mail and malware masked a highly sophisticated operation that would subsequently download
software tools and file-stealing applications that could spread through a corporate network in secrecy, Vincent said. Attackers
often wait to launch their best malware after they’ve infiltrated a system. “They’re not going to bring their A-game, if they
only need C-players.”
While Cyber Squared could only identify 22 organizations, it believes dozens more have been compromised by the cyber criminals,
who are capable of managing spy operations in each compromised organization at the same time “like moving pieces on a chessboard,”
Vincent said.
Union heavyweight Paul Howes has renewed his attack on China’s trading practices, calling for an inquiry into allegations of cyber espionage.
The AWU national secretary says Australian manufacturers and food producers are being forced to compete on an uneven playing field.
He says China is engaging in “possibly illegal” practices by undervaluing its currency, dumping products onto international markets and even spying on competitors.
“Other countries, most particularly China, have again been flouting their WTO obligations in regards to intellectual property theft and hacking,” Mr Howes said in his keynote address to a national convention of Australian vegetable growers in Hobart.
“China has been accused of using industrial espionage as part of economic policy by stealing company secrets to attack foreign competitors.
“A strong government response to this would involve a full-scale inquiry into allegations of cyber espionage, and lodging a case with the World Trade Organisation.”
Mr Howes has previously criticised the devaluation of the yuan and said on Friday it could be as much as 40 per cent below its market value.
He said that was contributing to an overvaluation of the Australian dollar which was hurting sectors of the economy.
“By refusing to remove to a freely floating currency the Chinese are flouting the world’s rules in order to give themselves a significant trade advantage,” he said.
“China must take its new role as an emerging power in the world seriously and adopt the rules that successfully allowed it to emerge as an economic powerhouse.”
Mr Howes said Australia could only take advantage of the huge growth expected in Asia if it avoided “Dutch disease”, an influx of money into the mining sector alone.
“The danger … is that in the meantime we allow industries such as manufacturing, food and vegetable production to drift,” he said.
“It’s all well and good to talk about becoming the food bowl of Asia but we must take decisive action now to prepare ourselves.”
