New York – According to intelligence agencies, China is enlisting beautiful women for corporate espionage in the West. How does the dreaded “honeytrap” method work?
According to leaked French intelligence files, China has been employing beautiful female spies — the dreaded “honeytrap” method — and blackmail to steal business secrets from French executives. And it wouldn’t be the first time that China has used such tricks to gain access to privileged information. Here, a brief guide:
How does the “honeytrap” work? A beautiful woman wines, dines, and even beds a mark to get information from him, a la many a Bond flick. The French intelligence reports cite a case in which a young Chinese woman slept with a top French researcher at a major pharmaceutical company, a man unaware that she was a spy and that the encounter had been videotaped. “When he was shown the recorded film of the previous night in his hotel room… he proved highly cooperative,” says an intelligence official.
Have other countries fallen victim to Chinese “honeytraps”? Yes, in early 2010, Britain’s MI5 accused the Chinese government of using honeytrap schemes to hack into corporate British computer networks. Two years earlier, MI5 had distributed a document titled “The Threat from Chinese Espionage” to security officials, British banks, and businesses, explicitly warning executives of honeytraps and subsequent blackmail attempts: “Chinese intelligence services have also been known to exploit vulnerabilities such as sexual relationships and illegal activities to pressurize individuals to cooperate with them,” it read. “Hotel rooms in major Chinese cities such as Beijing and Shanghai which have been frequented by foreigners are likely to be bugged. Hotel rooms have been searched while the occupants are out of the room.”
What other means of espionage are the Chinese reportedly using? Other techniques cited by French intelligence officials include the “lamprey” and the “mushroom factory.” The lamprey technique involves soliciting business proposals from Western countries, and then rejecting the applications, telling bidders that they need “to improve their technical offering”; the Chinese then use what they’ve learned from the bids to develop their own products. In a recent incident, France’s TGV bid on a proposed high-speed Chinese train project, and even arranged a six-month training course for Chinese engineers, only to watch China build its own train that looked “remarkably similar” to the TGV trains. In the mushroom factory technique, local Chinese firms partnered with French companies in a joint venture, only to be bested by local “rivals” that were actually run by the original Chinese firm. Danone, a French dairy company, reportedly fell victim to this trick.
HAVANA (AFP) – Cuba has requested a 20-year prison term for US contractor Alan Gross who was arrested in 2009 on spying charges, a government statement has indicated, as Washington slammed the move as an “injustice.”
In a statement released through the Communist Party newspaper Granma, Cuba said Gross was being charged with violating Cuba’s “independence and territorial integrity,” and said a trial date will be fixed “shortly” in a case that has created a new diplomatic tension between Washington and Havana.
The charges against Gross, 61, are in the category of “crimes against state security” and suggest that Havana is taking a hard line in the high-profile case.
“The US government has been informed of this and duly notified through the diplomatic channels that its consular representatives, Mr Gross’s relatives and his family lawyers will be allowed to attend the trial,” the statement said.
Washington swiftly criticized the action.
President Barack Obama’s spokesman Robert Gibbs said Gross “has been unjustly detained and deprived of his liberty and freedom for the last 14 months.”
But instead of releasing him, the White House said the decision Friday “compounds the injustice suffered by a man helping to increase the free flow of information, to, from, and among the Cuban people.”
US State Department spokesman Charles Luoma-Overstreet said: “We deplore the Cuban government’s announcement… (Gross) has been held without charges for more than a year, contrary to all international human rights obligations and commitments regarding justice and due process.
“He should be home with his family now,” he said.
The contractor’s wife Judy Gross told AFP that she would spend the weekend processing the possible implications for her husband and their family.
“I’m trying to digest the news myself,” she said, declining further comment.
US authorities have argued that Gross worked for a non-government organization contracted by the State Department to supply computer and communications material to civil society groups on the island, and that he should be freed.
Washington officials said that Gross, an international development worker, visited Cuba to help members of the Jewish community in Havana link up with other Jewish communities throughout the world.
In December, a State Department spokesman said Gross had “languished in a Cuban jail for a full year” with no explanation or charges filed against him and that the actions “violate international standards of due process and judicial procedure.”
On Friday the company that contracted Gross to work in Cuba, Development Alternatives Inc., described the threat of a 20-year prison sentence as an “outrage.”
The company said in a statement released to AFP that it called on “principled leaders within our government and in the international community to stand up for Alan and step up their efforts to bring him home to his family.”
The United States and Cuba have not had formal diplomatic ties since 1961, though Washington is represented by a US interest section in Havana.
On January 13, Cuba allowed a senior US diplomat to visit Gross, whose incarceration had become an obstacle in efforts to work towards normalized relations.
Arturo Valenzuela, the top US State Department official for Latin America, said recently that Washington had made it “very clear” to Havana that it will be difficult to reach any major agreements as long as Cuba is holding Gross.
Cuba has been pressing meanwhile for the release of five of its nationals held in prison since 1998 in the United States on espionage charges.
On January 15, Obama eased restrictions on visas, remittances and travel under the US embargo on Cuba, saying it would “increase people-to-people contact,” and “enhance the free flow of information” to the communist-ruled island.
U.S. surveillance. The Obama administration, once again, is reaching farther than its predecessor on electronic surveillance. Now it wants a law requiring internet service providers to keep logs of their customers on the web — all of them, not suspected bad actors — just in case the government may want the data. Lots of ISPs keep logs already, but the government is trying to ensure that you can’t find one that offers greater privacy. This is not different in concept from requiring hotels and restaurants to install microphones and video recorders in every public space, lest the country’s 30 million existing surveillance cameras miss a spot. The Justice Department’s Jason Weinstein told Congress the proposed new law is — no, really — good for privacy:
… malicious cyber actors do not respect our laws or our privacy. The government has an obligation to prevent, disrupt, deter, and defeat such intrusions…Privacy interests can be undercut when data is not retained for a reasonable period of time, thereby preventing law enforcement officers from obtaining the information they need to catch and prosecute those criminals.
Can you spot the logical elision here? Surveillance is usually justified by reference to pedophiles and cyber spies, but most of the government’s data mining — involving hundreds of thousands of secret requests each year — do not even assert a reasonable suspicion that a customer has done anything wrong. The post-Patriot Act legal standard requires only that authorities can plausibly describe the information as “relevant to” an investigation. Authorities acknowledge that an enormous number of innocent Americans have had their private data swept up and stored (usually forever) in government archives.
Chinese cyber-spying. Government sponsored hackers in China appear to have impersonated National Journal‘s Bruce Stokes in a spear-phishing email attack on US diplomats. It’s a new twist on an old scheme, and it’s a reminder that you can’t assume the person on the “From” line is who he says he is:
The e-mails that seemed to come from Stokes contained a virus that, if opened, would have burrowed an electronic tunnel to the host computer, letting the intruder root around in the owner’s files and siphon off copies.
A minimum precaution: keep your anti-malware protections up to date, and install security updates for all your software as soon as they arrive.
Why I’ll Probably Be Locked Out of Facebook Soon. Facebook means well with its new security plan, which authenticates suspicious log-on attempts by asking users to identify photos of their friends. But there are “friends” and friends. Readers of my book on Dick Cheney often friend me, and I couldn’t name one of them by sight. And what about all those friends of yours whose profile pictures are babies and animals? Pick ten random names from your friends list. Could you pass Facebook’s new test?
Greed was the clear motivation for the most serious case of insider trading to appear before a British court.
After all, Christian Littlewood, an investment banker who made his way up the ranks to director at Dresdner Kleinwort, had already been earning £400,000 (S$820,000) a year. And yet he still used information gleaned from the office to make £590,000 in profit from illegal insider trading.
He made his Singaporean wife Angie, 39, to use her maiden name, Lew Siew Yoon, to buy the shares in her name to avoid detection. She teamed up with her Singaporean friend, Helmy Omar Sa’aid, in using her husband’s price-sensitive tip-offs to trade 2.15 million pounds worth of shares.
All three pleaded guilty to eight counts of insider trading for the scam that they had been doing for eight years – from 2000 to 2008 – at different London Stock Exchange and AIM listed shares.
According to a Straits Times report, the court found that Littlewood would spy on his colleague’s computers and eavesdropped to gather information which he would pass to his wife and Sa’id. They would then buy shares in firms that were subject to takeover bids. Once the share prices went up after news of the takeover came up, the two would then sell their shares, making a tidy profit.
Christian Littlewood, the most senior banker caught while still working by the Financial Services Authority, now faces three years and four months in jail.
His wife, Angie, was given a 12-month jail sentence, suspended for two years. She will be electronically tagged for the first three months of her suspended sentence and will be under curfew at her home between 8am and 7pm.
The judge said she was under her husband’s influence was already suffering from “moderate depression and possible alcoholism”, and was a good mother to her three young children, aged three, five, and eight, according to a Reuters report. At least one of them has a serious medical condition.
“In my judgment, you did as you were told to do by your husband,” he said.
Sa’id received a two-year sentence, and will be deported to Singapore. He had already spent almost one year in jail since being extradited from the Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean last March.
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The Securities and Exchange Commission was formally charged six men in an insider trading case.
The group includes Anthony Longoria, a former manager at AMD, as well as Daniel DeVore, a manager at Dell as well as Marvell consultant Winifred Jiau, Flextronics executive Walter Shimoon and two employees of investment research firm Primary Global.
Longoria, Shimoon as well as the primary Global employees were arrested in an FBI sting back in December. The original accusation involved passing on confidential product information in exchange for money to Primary Global. These new SEC charges apparently stem from new findings from an ongoing investigation as the organization alleges that Longoria, DeVore, Jiau and shimoon “obtained material, non-public confidential information about quarterly earnings and performance data and shared that information with hedge funds and other clients of PGR who traded on the inside information.” According to the SEC, the illegally provided information resulted in profits in the amount of about $6 million. “Company executives and other insiders moonlighting as consultants to hedge funds cannot blatantly peddle their company’s confidential information for personal gain,” Robert Khuzami, director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, said in a statement.
According to the SEC, Longoria collected more than 130,000 in consulting fees from primary Global, while DeVore was paid about $145,000, Shimoon $13,600 and Jiau $200,000. The complaint filed by the SEC asks to prevent Longoria, Shimoon and DeVore from acting as an officer or director of any registered public company, to repay any gains including interest and pay additional penalties. Similar cases in the past have also resulted in jail time.
