Cyber terrorism and espionage have been highlighted as growing threats to Australian organisations and government departments, according to a new annual report by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO).
The Annual Report 2011-12, which was tabled in the federal parliament this week, found that ASIO completed more than 150,000 counter terrorism security assessments during the reporting period.
“Emerging technology and an Internet-connected world offer new avenues of espionage,” read the report.
“The espionage threat is evidence by foreign intelligence services seeking agents in relevant positions, including in the Australian public service and working for Australian businesses, but also seeking access to any computer system or network holding data that could be targeted for espionage activity.”
According to the report, cyber espionage state and non-state actors continued to target Australian organisations.
ASIO pointed out that critical infrastructure, such as SCADA networks, is one area organisations need to focus on protecting in Australia.
“Critical infrastructure by its very nature poses a potential target for those who wish to do harm to Australia and so careful consideration must be given to matters having an impact on the security of critical infrastructure,” read the report.
“No single element of critical infrastructure stands alone and the potential for threats against auxiliary assets must also be considered.”
Over the 2011-12 period, ASIO provided 25 briefing sessions on potential or specific threats to critical infrastructure and produced 22 reports. These were sent to more than 153 government and private sector organisations.
Cyber terrorism
Turning to terrorism, ASIO reported that international influences through the Internet will continue to inspire some Australians to potentially join terrorism groups such as al-Qa’ida.
“Over the 12 months, al-Qa’ida and its affiliates have suffered a number of setbacks including the loss of senior figures such as Anwar al-Aulaqi, in Yemen,” read the report.
“The continuing counter-terrorism efforts of Australia’s partners in South-East Asia are also having an effect on regional extremist networks, although terrorist threats persist.”
However, ASIO conceded that these setbacks have not lessened the extent of what the report referred to as “violent jihadist” groups to promote, foster and engage in terrorism.
“The global tempo of terrorist activities, including attacks, attempted attacks, plotting, fundraising and recruitment, remains undiminished.”
CREST
The report went on to highlight ASIO’s connection with the Australian arm of the Council of Registered Ethical Security Testers (CREST) which was established in March 2012.
“CREST Australia is the product of co-ordinated engagement with industry involving ASIO, CERT Australia and the Defence Signals Directorate [DSD] and will have an important role in establishing clear and agreed standards for cyber-security testing.”
According to the report, the CREST standards will help the business sector be confident that the work conducted by CREST-accredited IT security professionals is completed with integrity, accountability and to agreed international standards. In addition, CREST Australia is affiliated with CREST Great Britain.
Federal agents picked through garbage, spied on phone calls and captured reams of email as they went after a Houston businessman now accused of leading a scheme to ship sensitive U.S. technology to Russia’s military.
The 11-person ring, allegedly led by Alexander Fishenko, is not accused of espionage, as classified documents were not given to Russia, but of breaking U.S. law by sending loads of protected microelectronics that can be used for guiding anti-ship missiles or radars as well as have civilian-world uses.
One of the most damning yet simplest bits of evidence made public so far came from the mouths of one of the company’s managers while being interviewed over the phone by an employee working on a college paper and seeking to understand how Fishenko’s company, ARC Electronics, got around strict export laws and avoided suspicion.
The answer: “We’re lying.”
In another conversation, the manager, Alexander Posobilov, is asked by an employee in Russia, who is among three fugitives in the case, what would happen if word gets out about what is going on: “We will be f—–.”
Those words were among thousands recorded by the FBI. The conversations leave little doubt at least some of the persons charged likely knew they were doing something dubious.
Three people charged, including Fishenko, appealed Wednesday to U.S. Magistrate Judge George C. Hanks Jr. to free them on bond pending trial. All appeared in court wearing green prisoner uniforms and shackled at the waists and ankles as about two dozen family members and friends looked on.
The hearing is to continue Thursday.
The eight defendants who have been arrested are Slavic country immigrants, several from Russia, who now live in Houston. Most if not all have no known criminal records. Several are U.S. citizens with extended family here, although they have been issued passports by both countries.
No aid from consulate
The Russian consulate in Houston submitted a letter that stated should any of the defendants be released, it would not help them escape, an apparent attempt to belay concerns it could issue them travel documents or take diplomatic actions to assist them.
Prosecutor Daniel Silver argued none should be released pending an outcome of charges in the case, as they would most certainly flee the United States to countries abroad where they have relatives and the ability to rebuild their lives aboard.
In testimony Wednesday, FBI agent Crosby Houpt said that ARC disguised itself as a traffic-light manufacturer, then lied about what the microelectronics were to be used for in order to avoid drawing any suspicion from suppliers.
The equipment would be shipped from Houston through an airport in New York and then ultimately on to Russia.
“ARC would receive shopping lists from Russian entities, and they would go about acquiring the parts on the shopping lists,” Houpt testified.
He also said Fishenko and other company managers took steps to try and hide what was going on from some of their employees, especially any word that parts would be sent to the military.
Among the evidence are documents in Russian that the FBI seized that show that a company tied to Fishenko was authorized to procure parts for the military, and another in which an intelligence arm of the government complains that it had been sent defective parts.
Defense attorneys have sought to portray most of the accused as Houstonians with productive lives here who immigrated to the U.S. years ago.
Fishenko’s attorney, Eric Reed, said his client is a family man who moved to Houston in 1994 with his wife, who is Jewish and came as what she described as a refugee fleeing discrimination based on her religion.
He noted how important Fishenko was in the life of his young son, whom he dropped off at elementary school before being arrested last week.
Grandmother charged
Another person charged, Lyudmila Bagdikian, is a grandmother who had survived cancer, had no criminal record anywhere, and had only worked for Fishenko’s Houston company, ARC Electronics, for a short time before it was raided last week, said her attorney Kent Schaffer
Yet another, Sevinj Taghiyeva, came to Houston on a student visa to study at the University of Houston and went on to get a work visa through ARC.
Charles Flood, an attorney for ARC saleswoman Viktoria Klebanova, said his client didn’t know what the higher-ups were doing.
He portrayed the charges as a nonviolent export violation and mocked the idea she was any kind of James Bond as he questioned the FBI agent.
“She doesn’t have machine guns behind the headlights of her 2003 Savannah (car), does she?” Flood asked the agent. “She doesn’t have a secret phone in her shoes, does she?”
Have you heard? A federal court’s decision may provide the impetus to overhaul Illinois’ ridiculously restrictive eavesdropping law.
Last week, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union in 2010. The suit sought to block Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez from prosecuting ACLU staff members for recording police officers performing their duties in public places. Such recording has been one of the ACLU’s long-standing monitoring missions.
Illinois’ eavesdropping law, which was enacted in 1961, makes it a felony for someone to produce an audio recording of a conversation unless all parties involved agree to it. The law sets a maximum punishment of 15 years in prison if a law enforcement officer is recorded. The law applies to audio recordings only.
In its opinion, the appeals court wrote, “The Illinois eavesdropping statute restricts far more speech than necessary to protect legitimate privacy interests. As applied to the facts alleged here, it likely violates the First Amendment’s free speech and free-press guarantees.”
We heard that.
The biggest problem with the state’s law as it stands is that it was written in an era when technology was far less developed than it is today. In 1961, the law was meant to prevent illicit recording of conversations through the use of hidden microphones and wire-tapping devices.
But fast-forward to 2012, and it’s a whole new ballgame. Much of the citizenry is equipped with phones capable of recording video and audio. It has becoming increasingly common for everyday citizens to pull out their phones when they see something newsworthy and to record the events, often capturing conversations and other sounds.
Especially as this trend applies to law enforcement officers, these recordings sometimes have captured police doing illegal or objectionable things, such as beating, Tasing or pepper-spraying people. Just as the framers of the Constitution provided for a free press to expose such abuses, so-called “I” reporters often have provided critical evidence of wrongdoing on the part of those charged with fighting crimes, not committing them.
Police often say that if citizens are not doing anything wrong, they shouldn’t object to searches and other law enforcement techniques. We believe the same is true in reverse: If law enforcement officers are not doing anything wrong, they shouldn’t object to audio recordings of their actions and words.
We believe there are enough laws on the books already that protect police officers in the case of citizens overstepping their boundaries and interfering with cops trying to do their lawful duty. And any rewrite of Illinois’ eavesdropping law should make that distinction clear and include it in the statute.
But we also believe it’s time for the General Assembly to overhaul this outdated and overly restrictive law to reflect new technologies, as well as the longstanding constitutional rights of citizens and the press. And we hope lawmakers get that message loud and clear.
And why not? Spend some time here and you can feel as if you’d been admitted to the backstage preparations for a magic show. The difference is that in espionage, life or death and the fate of nations are at stake, rather than whether a woman can be successfully sawed in half or an ace of spades pulled from a shuffled deck. These magicians weren’t performing; they were dueling.
Here, drawn from the immense private collection of the intelligence historian H. Keith Melton, and the collections of the C.I.A., the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Reconnaissance Office, are objects ranging from a poisoned needle, hidden inside a coin, to a fragment of the United States Embassy in Moscow that the Soviets riddled with bugs during its construction in the 1980s; two floors were razed and rebuilt.
There is a K.G.B. model of the umbrella that injected a poison ricin pellet into the Bulgarian defector Georgi Markov in 1978; a handmade pair of shoes made for a United States ambassador to Czechoslovakia in the 1960s that Czech intelligence officers bugged with a listening device in the heel; a Stasi-created molar that was hollowed out to allow microdots to be safely stored in a spy’s mouth; and a well-preserved rat with a Velcroed body cavity that was used by Americans in Moscow for exchanges of information without agents’ actually meeting. The rodent, treated with hot pepper sauce to discourage scavenging cats, was easily tossed from a passing car for these “dead drops.”
But most of these objects, tools of the trade over a half-century, are not the stuff of the “Mission Impossible” franchise; they are almost all deliberately mundane. They are not meant to startle; they are meant to fade into the background. They work like tricks sold in a magic shop. And they must be used with similar skill.
Something else is similar: once explained, the magic is gone. The objects used in espionage can almost seem silly. Really! Grown people sprinkling dust (nitrophenylpentadienal) on objects to track the movements of whoever touched them? Using a hat, glasses and a fake mustache as a disguise? Employing a hollowed-out nickel to hide top-secret microfilm? All of espionage can easily seem like a kid’s game, except for the trails of blood and insight that are invariably left in its wake.
And this show, produced by Base Entertainment, contains more than enough to make it resemble a child’s game: interactive screens on which you can disguise a photo of yourself; kiosks where your voice can be distorted and filtered; a mist-filled dark room with shifting laser beams that challenge you to make your way across, without breaking the circuit. (A password-oriented interactive game is too lame for its climactic position in the exhibition.)
There are also larger objects here that reveal, more dramatically, that technological sophistication is not a requirement, nor is it something that necessarily increases over time. Next to a collapsible motor scooter with which Allied spies parachuted behind enemy lines during World War II is a saddle, draped with an Afghan blanket, that was used by a C.I.A. officer riding across the forbidding terrain during the first months after the Sept. 11 attacks.
But the objects selected by Mr. Melton — whose collection of over 9,000 spy devices, books and papers has also helped stock the International Spy Museum in Washington — are not presented simply for sensation’s sake. There are very few weapons here, aside from the ice-climbing ax that was brutally smashed into Trotsky’s skull in Mexico — and we see it mounted near his assassin’s bloodied eyeglasses.
Mr. Melton also has stories behind his acquisition of such objects, though his reluctance to share his methods in too much detail suggests a firsthand experience with the world he is documenting. (How did an original K.G.B. model of the bugged American Embassy get into his hands?)
What happens along the way is that we gain an appreciation for the magic as well as the method; we end up glimpsing what these ordinary objects actually accomplished and what was at stake when they were used. The show could have been stronger if that context had been made clearer, but even with its gadget-centered focus, we learn that this great bag of tricks was no mere game.
“Spy: The Secret World of Espionage” is on view through March 31, 2013, at Discovery Times Square, 226 West 44th Street; discoverytsx.com.
Research Electronics International (REI) asserts that corporate espionage and theft of business information is thriving.
Cookeville, TN (PRWEB) May 19, 2012
Research Electronics International (REI), a leading manufacturer of security equipment to protect against corporate espionage, asserts that corporate espionage and theft of information is thriving. According to Frank Figliuzzi, FBI Counterintelligence Assistant Director, the current FBI caseload shows that commercial secrets worth more than US$13 billion have been stolen from American companies. This number does not include the unreported or undetected losses, nor does it include the losses in the brand value of the victims. The sheer scale of economic espionage against the nation’s top companies threatens America’s economic and technical position in the global economy.
It is a common misconception that espionage only occurs at government agencies and does not affect the business world. However, REI has been promoting that companies should be aware that any information that might benefit a competitor is at risk of espionage or theft, including price lists, customer lists, marketing strategies, insider product information, and financial information. Recently, the FBI launched a campaign promoting corporate espionage awareness including billboards, signs in bus shelters, and website information educating the public about the real and present threat of corporate information theft, and encouraging companies to protect their information from theft.
Companies should be on guard and take the following steps to protect business related information, as stated on the FBI’s website:
1. Recognize there is an insider and outsider threat to your company.
2. Identify and valuate trade secrets.
3. Implement a proactive plan for safeguarding trade secrets.
4. Secure physical and electronic versions of your trade secrets.
5. Confine intellectual knowledge on a “need-to-know” basis.
6. Provide training to employees about your company’s intellectual property plan and security.
For more information on technical equipment to protect against corporate espionage, visit http://www.reiusa.net.
About Research Electronics International
For over 28 years, Research Electronics International (REI) has focused on protecting corporate information, designing and manufacturing technical security equipment to protect against illicit information theft. REI is recognized as an industry leader by corporations, law enforcement agencies, and government agencies for technical security equipment. REI’s corporate offices, RD, manufacturing facilities, and Center for Technical Security are located in Tennessee USA, with an extensive global network of resellers and distribution partners. For more information call +1 (931) 537-6032 or visit REI on the web at http://www.reiusa.net.
Contact Person: Lee Jones
Research Electronics International
Tel: +1 931 537-6032
email: sales(at)reiusa(dot)net
LEE JONES
RESEARCH ELECTRONICS INTERNATIONAL
(931) 537-6032 Email Information
