MONTREAL – Stealing secrets through cyber espionage may not have enough action for a spy like James Bond, but there can be less risk and “your own guys don’t get hurt,” a global security expert says.
Cyber spying is going to get more sophisticated and governments and businesses will continue to be targeted, said Steve Durbin, global vice-president of the Information Security Forum.
“If you go back to the original James Bond era, you used to have guys slugging around the streets trying to steal secrets,” Durbin said from New York.
“You don’t have that problem any more because you can set up a laptop or a computer in a living room and try to crack into systems around the world.”
Spying has always been around and now it’s just making use of the technology that’s out there,” he said.
Durbin calls it “clean espionage” and said more often than not it is state sponsored.
“This isn’t about blowing things up, although you can do that, clearly. It’s clean espionage rather than some of the dirtier elements of people slugging it out in Afghanistan, for example.”
This kind of espionage can use computer malware or exploit technology such as close-captioned TV cameras, GPS data, satellite feeds and telecom traffic, in addition to “feet on the street,” he said.
Durbin cites the Stuxnet virus as an example of clean espionage.
Stuxnet was tailored to disrupt Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and caused some setbacks within its uranium enrichment labs. It infected thousands of employees’ computers at the nuclear power reactor, Iranian officials have said. The United States and Israel are believed to be suspects.
An attack like that has more impact on the people being targeted than on your own forces, he said.
“So that’s attractive because not only is it effective, it is lower cost and your own guys don’t get hurt.”
China also has been accused by cyber security analysts of computer-based attacks focused on American oil, gas and other energy companies.
The U.K.-based Information Security Forum deals with security challenges that its corporate and public sector members are facing. It’s considered a global authority on information risk management and cyber security.
Durbin said infrastructure such as transportation, government national defence programs and networks, and energy and defence companies can all be targets.
Canada’s auditor general has said the federal government has been slow to boot up an effective response to the threat of cyber attacks on crucial systems.
The auditor general’s report said the shortcomings have left key networks — such as the one that ensures employment insurance benefits are delivered on time — exposed to attack.
Associate professor Tom Dean of Queen’s University said governments need to worry about what’s called advanced persistent threats.
They aren’t a standard virus or botnet that’s sending out spam email, said Dean, who teaches in the electrical and computer engineering faculty at Queen’s in Kingston, Ont.
“Advanced persistent threats from the more sophisticated actors, quite a few of which are state sponsored, are basically camping out and gathering information,” he said.
“That’s the biggest deal.”
China, Russia, areas in the Balkans, and former Soviet republics are considered suspects in state-sponsored cyber spying, he said.
Dean said there is potential for a destructive cyber attack but that would be “an act of war.”
ELLICOTT CITY, Md. – Maryland police say two women were videotaped inside of their own home.
The peeping Tom in this case was crafty enough to break into the home and install a camera, but not smart enough to keep that camera from capturing video of himself, which is now in the hands of the Howard County Police Department.
The videos show the suspect walking through the women’s home and eventually installing the camera inside of a closet.
He apparently kept it running, and went back into the condominium unit several times to retrieve the videos of the two women who live there, and move the camera to different locations.
Both of the victims are in their 20s.
“I’m surprised, but I guess I’m not completely shocked because I hear things like that. But it’s surprising that it’s here,” said Trish Kirsch, who has lived in The Villages of Montgomery Run condominium complex for 10 years.
Other residents say they’d heard about the high-tech peeping Tom from a community watch email.
“Some stranger had entered an apartment with two girls living there, and he videotaped their bedrooms,” said Tayseer Elbeshir.
Police say it started in June — and the man kept coming back until recently, when one of the women found the camera, and called police.
“There doesn’t appear to have been forced entry so we’re not sure how he gained access to the apartment, and he apparently did it multiple times,” said Sherry Llewellyn, a spokeswoman for the Howard County Police Department.
Each condominium in the complex is individually owned, and many of them are rented out; police have already checked maintenance people and contractors working in the area.
The locks on the women’s door have been changed — but police have not been able to identify the man who managed to video-tape himself committing a crime, yet.
“It’s a beautiful area; it’s a beautiful quiet neighborhood,” Elbeshir said. “So something like this to happen is weird. It’s different.”
In some of those videos the man is wearing what might be a work uniform.
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Nippon Steel Sumitomo Metal Corp. says its lawsuit against South Korean steelmaker Posco has broader implications for other domestic businesses whose technology is leaked.
During the first session at the Tokyo District Court on Thursday, Posco categorically denied stealing technological secrets, but Nippon Steel Sumitomo Metal claims it has solid evidence detailing the company’s industrial espionage in the alleged theft of manufacturing knowhow related to a specialty steel product. It is pressing for ¥98.6 billion in damages and an injunction to block Posco from producing it.
The Japanese firm became the world’s second-largest steelmaker with a 30 percent market share through the Oct. 1 merger of Nippon Steel Corp. and Sumitomo Metal Industries Ltd., while Posco has the fifth-largest global share, at around 20 percent. Each firm dominates its respective domestic market, and the two have also worked together as strategic partners since 2000 in research and product development.
The alleged theft concerns so-called grain-oriented electrical steel sheets, which are used in the core part of voltage transformers in the transmission of electricity to households. The now-defunct Nippon Steel used to be the market leader for the product after developing technology that boosted the efficiency of power transmission in the 1990s, although Posco has increased its presence in the sector since 2005.
Nippon Steel Sumitomo Metal says its suit focuses on five sets of technology-related documents it claims were leaked to Posco by former Japanese employees. The documents are known to have been sold by a former Posco employee to China’s Baoshan Iron Steel Co. for 5 billion won (about ¥365 million).
South Korean media outlets lashed out at the Posco employee after the country’s criminal courts handed down a guilty verdict in 2008. During that trial, it was proven that the titles of the five documents were written in Japanese and were identical to those of Nippon Steel.
The Japanese steelmaker claims any suggestion of a coincidence “is absolutely unnatural. It just means the documents held by Posco were leaked” from Nippon Steel.
Nippon Steel Sumitomo Metal alleges that four Nippon Steel employees who retired during the 1980s and 1990s contacted Posco and sold it the documents in question. It has also lodged an ¥80 billion damages suit against one of them, whom the company argues played the central role in the sale.
“We have in our hands specifics, such as the amount of compensation paid and details of the contact made. But we are not divulging them until the right time,” Nippon Steel Sumitomo Metal said.
However, Posco argues “it has hardly been made clear who contacted who and the date and time of such contact.”
Nippon Steel Sumitomo Metal is represented by Nishimura Asahi, while Posco has retained Abe, Ikubo Katayama. Both law firms are known for their expertise in intellectual property cases, and court arguments are likely to be vicious.
Japanese companies usually do not contest cases of industrial espionage vigorously, believing trials could further undermine their competitiveness.
“It is an important lawsuit in which the future of Japanese businesses is at stake,” a senior official at Nippon Steel Sumitomo Metal said. “It’s the best opportunity to show both domestically and internationally that industrial espionage in Japan does not pay.”
Man of mystery … Jean-Philippe Wispelaere admitted during his trial that he thought of himself as James Bond.
One of the weirdest espionage cases in Australian history just got weirder.
A US intelligence officer is writing a book about how a psychic was used to track bumbling spy and former Brighton schoolboy Jean-Philippe Wispelaere during a secretive operation more than a decade ago.
Wispelaere was a low-level imagery analyst who should probably never have got through the security vetting process.
Scott Carmichael, an author and senior security and counter-intelligence investigator at the US Defence Intelligence Agency, worked on the Wispelaere case in 1999. He is writing a book about how he used a psychic to identify Wispelaere after the former Australian Defence Intelligence Organisation analyst tried to sell stolen US documents to Singaporean embassy officials in Thailand.
While Wispelaere had given his email address to the embassy during negotiations to sell 1382 classified documents for hundreds of thousands of dollars, US authorities were not sure of his identity or whether he would make contact with the embassy again.
The Australian National University graduate eventually did make contact. He was then tricked by the Federal Bureau of Investigation into travelling to the US, where he was arrested, and sentenced to 15 years in federal prison in 2001.
The 41-year-old was released earlier this year and snubbed Australia, the country where he was raised and where his mother still lives, for Canada, his country of birth.
Wispelaere in his year 12 Brighton Secondary College School photograph.
Mr Carmichael stated, via email, that the use of psychics to identify ”unknown subjects” had been common among US intelligence agencies in the 1980s and was used until 1995.
It had been phased out by the time of the Wispelaere case, but Mr Carmichael said he decided to get in contact with psychic Angela Ford to conduct an operation that was not authorised by DIA.
”The agency was out of the psychic business,” Mr Carmichael said. ”It seemed that I was out of luck. But I persisted. It was a purely personal endeavour to determine whether Angela could develop – through paranormal means – useful information about the walk-in event.”
Ms Ford said in an email that she had been told little detail about the case during her contact with Mr Carmichael, but had been able to establish that the man had called himself Baker, was an Australian, and was muscular and aged in his 20s.
She determined Wispelaere had tried to sell US documents at the Singaporean embassy in Bangkok, but she was confused as to why he had said he was involved with US imagery when he was an Australian.
Wispelaere, a steroid abuser and gym junkie, had used the name Jeff Baker when he approached the embassy, and had claimed to be an American.
”I was working many cases at this time and I was kept in the dark on all of them,” Ms Ford said.
”I couldn’t know anything about the cases I was working on because that would be cheating.”
US Naval Institute Press publicist Judy Heise confirmed Mr Carmichael was preparing a manuscript on the Wispelaere case and had previously had a book published by the company. She also confirmed his position with the DIA.
Clive Williams, a former intelligence analyst and army officer, said he was not aware of psychics ever being used in Australian operations. The visiting fellow at the Australian National University’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, and adjunct professor at Macquarie University’s Centre for Policing, Intelligence and Counter-terrorism, said he did not think the US had ever had much success with their psychic programs.
Professor Williams said he often found the published accounts of those who had worked in intelligence agencies questionable.
”Wispelaere’s espionage case was not very complicated. In fact, it was quite straightforward from an investigative perspective,” he said.
”Wispelaere was a low-level imagery analyst who should probably never have got through the security vetting process.
”There is a cottage industry of writers who claim that bin Laden is not dead, the Israelis were behind the World Trade Centre attack, etc. Of course, it is often very hard to prove the opposite case and may be limited by releasability of information.”
9 Jul Jean-Philippe Wispelaere was falling apart. The East Brunswick boy who had tried to commit suicide as a seven-year-old had grown into an unstable young man and, faced with life in a US prison on espionage charges, began to implode.
6 Jul A Melbourne spy who spent more than a decade in a US federal prison after being convicted of espionage charges has snubbed Australia, the country he once considered home.
Bloomberg reports that China’s Supreme People’s Court was due to begin hearing AMSC Inc.’s copyright infringement case against Sinovel Wind Group Co. last Friday.
AMSC, a Devens-based maker of wind-turbine components, is seeking $6 million in damages from Sinovel, which is accused of stealing trade secrets from the local company through a rogue employee.
It’s one of four cases totaling $1.2 billion AMSC is seeking against Sinovel.
Sinovel stopped accepting contracted shipments from AMSC in March 2011.
