Corporate Espionage and Countermeasures News
News updates and articles are presented regarding corporate espionage, eavesdropping, electronic countermeasures, and TSCM. Please subscribe for automatic updates by entering your email address in the box on the right. You can search past articles and view archives in the column on the right.
Excerpts from recent posts are shown below. Click on the title to view the entire article.
TSCM Tip: Overcome Glare on the REI Oscor Green/Blue Spectrum Analyzer
The REI Oscor Green and Oscor Blue have a built-in wire stand that tilts the unit to put the screen at a comfortable viewing angle. This is great and works properly much of the time. The challenge is that when there are ceiling lights directly overhead, the angle will often create glare for the operator. This glare can be very difficult to see through. Presented here is a simple extension stand that will give an extra few inches of tilt and help reduce the glare.
Tech watch: Fans transmitting data from air-gapped computers
Researchers at Ben Gurion University have published a paper regarding their experiments transmitting data from an air-gapped computer to a smartphone in the same room. They were able to inject malware into the computer that used the noise from the cooling fans in the computer to [...]
History: Caversham Park-End of an era for BBC listening station
This bit of history just in from BBC news, bbc.com, BBC Monitoring began in 1939 as an operation to allow the British government to access foreign media and propaganda during World War Two For nearly 75 years BBC staff at a sprawling stately home on [...]
Future TSCM tool? Walabot uses RF to see inside walls.
Walabot is a sensor that looks into objects using radio frequency signals. It comes in three versions, Starter Kit, Maker, and Pro ($150, $300, and $600 respectively). It seems that the company doesn't quite know what to do with it yet, they are reaching out [...]
Jobs lost over eavesdropping
Recent news points to the need to have clear company policies regarding eavesdropping and listening devices. Educate your employees that eavesdropping is illegal. Illinois tech director arrested on eavesdropping charges Law enforcement officials in Knox County, Ill. earlier this week arrested a longtime IT employee of Abingdon-Avon School [...]
Corporate espionage by former employees
Recent industrial espionage concerns hit two major US corporations. Both IBM and Monsanto allege that former employees stole proprietary computer files and programming code that ended up in the hands of the Chinese. Information is the most valuable asset of corporations today and they must take [...]
International Spy Museum new location underway.
Construction fences are up and site work is underway for a new and expanded International Spy Museum (SPY) in the nation’s capital. Preparations recently began as SPY and The JBG Companies reached agreement to relocate the Museum to a newly constructed building at L’Enfant Plaza—between [...]
Political eavesdropping, from municipalities to nations
Political privacy concerns abound. Recent articles point to eavesdropping concerns in a small municipality's board of education as well as on the national scale in Brazil.
Eavesdropping and bugging the analog way- …picking up good vibrations. New research taps into tiny motors.
Researchers at the University of Illinois have now discovered that they can record the voltages present on the small vibration motors that exist in many high tech devices then reconstruct audio from the location of the device. Phones, toys, watches, and many IoT (Internet of Things) devices all may contain vibration motors. Of course, you would need access to the motor to be able to monitor the voltage, so phones and watches may not be that susceptible to covert monitoring, but with new devices appearing everyday, the old threat of picking up good vibrations could be making a comeback.
Eavesdropping software spots patterns humans miss.
Machine-learning system looked at the waveform of the voice data – its pattern of spikes and troughs – rather than the audio recording directly. It detected thing that humans missed.