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

Keep abreast of the espionage threats facing your organisation.

Best Sites for Online Snooping

via Forbes.com…
A few simple tools can get you information once available only to private investigators and police.

In May Matthew Smith received a piece of junk e-mail from a marketer. The marketer chose the wrong guy to spam. 
Smith, a pseudonym, is a former hacker and now works as a network security engineer. He runs a blog called Attack Vector devoted to online security issues. He decided to use the marketer, named Steve, as his guinea pig to show how easy it is to track down information about someone based solely on an e-mail address, and documented how he did it to serve as a warning to others who may not understand the power of what’s available to anyone looking to dig into your background. (more)

CSI – Who Poo’ed

What can property managers do when dog owners donā€™t pick up after their dogs? Under normal circumstances, not much, because there is no way of knowing who the violators might be. But now, with a new program called PooPrints that uses DNA to identify the dog in question, managers can catch the culprit (dog owner) in a matter of days.
PooPrints is a dog DNA identification program from BioPet Vet Lab built on a scientific foundation, providing communities with a means to enforce community regulations for pet waste clean-up. ā€œThe problem of pet owners not picking up after their pets is tearing apart communities,ā€ says BioPet Vet Lab CEO Tom Boyd. Consumer Reports lists ā€˜dog poopā€™ as one of the nationā€™s top ten personal gripes. So BioPet Vet Lab used its research in animal DNA identification systems to help provide community leaders with a tool to bring peace back to the neighborhood. (more)

In the Land of the Lords, no tenant skips

Australia – Tenants’ groups say they are outraged by a service that enables real estate agents to find out when a tenant is considering moving house. The service is offered by the database company TICA and involves the company sending an email alert to an agent if a tenant submits an application for another property. (more)

WSJ Finds Sheep Are Easy to Track

The down side of social not-working…
Many of the most popular applications, or “apps,” on the social-networking site Facebook Inc. have been transmitting identifying informationā€”in effect, providing access to people’s names and, in some cases, their friends’ namesā€”to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.

The issue affects tens of millions of Facebook app users, including people who set their profiles to Facebook’s strictest privacy settings. (more)