In addition to the US usage of “laser spying” against the Russians, Nasa technology that has previously been used to detect faint radio signals from space, is now being used to eavesdrop on a room where the curtains are blocking the windows. Using a “horn antenna” this “microwave” technology can blast a wave of energy that is between 30GHZ and !00Ghz through a building wall. If people are speaking inside a room, any flimsy surface, such as clothing will be vibrating, and cause a modulation of the radio beam as it reflects from the surface. It is then amplified and analyzed.

Simpler systems using the planted bug can also use a laser beam to transmit conversations. Such a device was found in the offices of Trinidad & Tobagos’s director of public prosecutions this year.

Experts say that there are still Russian ministries that use typewriters; including the Defense Ministry, Emergency Situations Ministry, and the Security Services Ministry. Now the Federal Guard Service, which is responsible for the security and protection of top officials, including the Russian President, has been budgeted $15,000 dollars for the purchase of new typewriters and new ink ribbons for the older machines.

The Moscow Times reports that “tender to purchase 20 electric typewriters for 486,540 rubles was published on the government’s procurement website zakpki.gov on July 3. According to the announcements, the equipment must be delivered to the special agency by Aug. 30”

“The typewriters in question are designed for printing classified documents, in that each machine has unique ‘handwriting’ that can be traced back to the source.” reports Radio Free Europe.

Although hard copies can be difficult to transport securely and easily lost, it is a sign of how hackers and leakers, as well as spies are making government officials wary of computer technology.

Omid Kokabee, an Iranian Ph.D. candidate in physics at the University of Texas in Austin, is standing trial on espionage charges in his homeland, after being held in custody since the end of January or February. It is believed he was picked up at the Tehran airport en route to continuing his graduate studies in the United States. Physics World reports that Kokabee allegedly divulged Iranian scientific data and was a CIA operative. The specific charges against him encompass unlawful earnings and contact with a hostile nation, a veiled reference to the CIA. The adviser for graduate studies in Kokabee’s department, John Keto, scoffed at Internet accounts that depicted the accused as a renowned nuclear physicist and maintained he was instead a beginning doctoral student in optics and photonics. His friends and colleagues suggest a likely motive for the arrest is to deter student involvement in the pro-democracy Green movement disputing the 2009 election of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Sources close to Kokabee gave his whereabouts while awaiting trial as Tehran’s Evin Prison, which has gained an infamous reputation for the many academic and political prisoners there as a result of Iran’s backlash against suspected spies for Western countries. The presiding judge at the trial is Abolghasem Salavati who, according to Eugene Chudnovsky of the Committee of Concerned Scientists, an international human rights organization, is noted for the severe penalties he imposes. Chudnovsky theorizes that a death sentence is within the realm of possibility, as a means to frighten Iranian students overseas. His organization has petitioned Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, to grant clemency to Kokabee, while the accused’s attorneys feel that international pressure and the media spotlight might aid their client.

Chung pleaded innocent, saying he wasn’t a spy, just an “ordinary man” with intentions of writing a book, which was his explanation for the hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents pertaining to the space shuttle, among other aviation, space and military data, that federal agents found at this home in 2006.

As an engineer working for Boeing and Rockwell, he had easy access to these documents. During his employment with these companies, he traveled back to China regularly, lecturing on his work and – as per the Court’s ruling – sharing secrets with the Chinese government, to the peril of the U.S.’s security and its economic and scientific advantage.

During his trial, the defendant told the judge that he loved the United States and wanted to live peacefully with his family, which includes children and grandchildren, in the United States – something that will now be rather difficult for him to achieve.

According to the prosecutors, Judge Carney said he wanted to make an example of Chung, that his trial and conviction should be a message to China to “stop sending [their] spies” to the U.S. According to the Court, Chung spied on behalf of China for three decades. In addition to the aforementioned documents, officials found in his home correspondence and journals logging the communication Chung had with Chinese government officials over the years. In one response to a written request from China, Chung wrote that he wanted to “make an effort to contribute to the Four Modernations of China.”

His defense team called Chung a “pack rat.” He kept everything, they said, but shared nothing. The U.S., hypersensitive of its vulnerability to China’s encroaching spy network, clearly did not buy this argument.

China’s Internet spying used to be fairly focused on acquiring defense and military information from the U.S. As such, the U.S. intelligence and defense community could better focus their retaliatory as well as preemptive defense mechanisms. As China’s interests have expanded to economic and industrial secrets, their cyber attacks are now more than ever before looking to tap into that unique brand of American innovation that the U.S. is so well known for.

Google believes that the hackers responsible for the January 12 attack were after the gmail account information of Chinese human rights activists. The company also reported that intellectual property was stolen.

Apparently Chinese cyber attacks on U.S. companies are common, but most companies don’t volunteer the information for fear that it will speak poorly of their online security. Google’s willingness to call China out, threatening even to leave the Chinese market as a result of the attack and the censorship its search engine is subject to in China, has caused other big companies – like Adobe Systems – to report similar attacks.

According to Alan Paller, Director of Research at the SANS Institute, a computer security firm, says, “The odds of the 25 biggest companies in California not being fully compromised by the Chinese is near zero…That is true of companies across the country.” So, really, no company is safe from the unrelenting force of Chinese espionage.

Paller describes China’s approach to hacking as a massive sweep. No rock is left unturned in search of information that could give China a competitive advantage. Once again, China’s strength in numbers gives it an edge. And, according to Congress’s U.S.-China commission, the U.S. is struggling to keep up.

Even though Obama has emphasized the importance of protecting the online world for both the public and private sectors, how is a question that remains unanswered. Right now, it looks like China might just be winning this war, especially given the recent directive by the White House National Security Council, which basically tells the U.S. spy community to remove China from its primary priority list for intelligence gathering.

CIA Director Leon Panetta and Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair have objected, referring in part to China’s aggressive cyber attacks. Proponents of the directive don’t seem to think the priority downgrade will significantly affect intelligence operations aimed at China, but if that were truly the case, why issue the directive in the first place…?

Wrong. The investment arm of the U.S. intelligence community, In-Q-Tel – which serves the CIA amongst other spy agencies – is putting some financial support into a software company that’s in the business of tracking social media.

The company – Visible Technologies – currently crawls 500,000 websites with user-generated content every day, gathering, organizing and dispersing info-feeds to its clients based on the keywords they have selected. Visible also rates the various posts as positive, negative, mixed or neutral and gives customers an indication as to how important/influential the information is. This allows clients to hone in on the important data without having to sift through pages and pages of conversation threads and commentary.

Thus far, Visible is gathering information from open networks only, so-called ‘open-source intelligence.’ Sites like Facebook are still off limits, but there’s plenty else by which to measure public sentiment, and In-Q-Tel spokesperson Donald Tighe says Visible’s technology will be especially valuable in providing the U.S. intelligence community with “early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally.”

Visible already has a slew of domestic corporate clients, including Microsoft, Dell, AT&T and Verizon. These clients want to keep abreast of what American consumers and in some cases, rights activists, have to say about them, their services and their new products.

Of course, spy agencies have just as much right to gather this readily available social media intelligence as anyone else does…it’s just a question of what rights they will be infringing upon once they put the intel to use. What domestic investigations and potentially unauthorized surveillance will the knowledge gleaned from Web 2.0 lead to…?

His is the biggest financial data theft accusation on record, says the U.S. Department of Justice – 130 million account numbers recently, added to 40 million from a previous charge. Gonzalez, 28, was already in prison, awaiting trial in NY for allegedly attempting to hack into the Dave & Buster’s computer network, when New Jersey indicted him for conspiracy to steal private data. The two suspected of being his co-conspirators are apparently Russian, but beyond that have not yet been identified.

According to the prosecutors, the trio basically hacked their way into corporate networks and installed malicious software, so when they returned, they would have easy access to all the financial data they wanted. The alleged victims of the theft include customers of 7-Eleven and Hannaford Brothers, as well as the NJ credit card processor Heartland Payment Systems.

If convicted of the charges, Gonzalez faces up to 20 years in prison.

It’s a little suspicious that the arrests follow last month’s collapse of a $19.2 billion investment deal between Rio Tinto and the state-owned Chinese company Chinalco. Australia’s foreign minister Stephen Smith does not think the arrests are necessarily related to the broken deal, but from our vantage point, it certainly seems to be a possibility!

The deal seemingly went bad because it did not get approval from Australia’s Foreign Investment Review Board – perhaps a result of the general clamoring that the agreement would put Australian resources at strategic risk.

The Australian arrested is Stern Hu, the general manager of Rio Tinto’s Shanghai office, where the three Chinese employees are based as well.

A Chinese government website reports the following:

“As understood from the Shanghai State Security Bureau, during China’s iron ore negotiation with foreign miners in 2009, Stern Hu gathered and stole state secrets from China via illegal means, including bribing internal staff of Chinese steel companies.”

The Chinese Foreign Ministry has explained that “relevant Chinese departments took action against him according to law on the strength of conclusive evidence that he stole China’s state secrets on behalf of overseas interests, thereby seriously damaging China’s economic interests and economic security.” The reference to ‘conclusive evidence’ has been cited often in the media, but of course China has not given any indication as to the nature of said evidence.

Smith is one of the many surprised by China’s reasons for the accusations and arrests, but he has explained to the Australian public that China’s definition of what constitutes state secrets and national security is much wider than in other countries – in other, less diplomatic words, China’s pretty paranoid.

photo: Reuters

South Korea was not the only country affected by a series of attacks in which websites experienced outages because cyber criminals engineered a situation in which tens of thousands of computers tried to connect to a single designated website at the same time. In the U.S., a notable increase in attacks of this nature began on July 4, 2009.

The high-volume attack is possible because the hackers create a virus that hijacks personal computers (unbeknownst to their owners) and has them simultaneously access the same website at the same time. This overwhelms the servers, and so the websites crash.

Recently, many South Korean and U.S. websites, including those of the White House and South Korea’s presidential Blue House, have been attacked in this way. Although South Korea believes that attacks are shrinking in number and so has lowered its alert, they are still keeping a careful watch on their cyber space, which they believe has been under the attack of North Korea.

South Korea’s spy agency believes that a military research wing in North Korea has orders to obliterate the South’s communication networks.

In addition to Denial-of-Service attacks that draw a lot of attention (it’s pretty easy to figure out that it’s going on, though not nearly as easy to identify the real perpetrators), South Korean media has reported in recent months that North Korea actually has an Internet warfare unit whose aim is to stealthily infiltrate South Korean and U.S. military networks for espionage and sabotage purposes. Apparently, the North employs between 500 and 1000 hackers.

South Korea is currently in the process of analyzing some of the computers that were infected with the malware allowing hackers to hijack and use the computers for their malicious intents. North Korea certainly seems to know its way around South Korea’s cyber infrastructure, seeing as it has allegedly stolen information from 1.65 million South Korean individuals since 2004.

In addition to analyzing computers and hard disks, the South has identified and blocked five IP addresses that are believed to have distributed the viruses that caused the recent wave of DoS attacks. The addresses were from Austria, Georgia, Germany, South Korea and the U.S., but this says nothing of the actual location/origin of the hackers behind the operation, as IP addresses can easily be masked.

Officially, he’s been charged with fraud and theft of trade secrets, and while he awaits his trial, he may not access any of the data he’s been accused of stealing. His computer use is also under surveillance.

Last week, a criminal complaint was filed by the U.S. Attorney’s office in New York against Aleynikov, which alleged that he “copied, without authorization, proprietary computer code belonging to a financial institution in the United States and then uploaded the code to a computer server in Germany.”

Although the identity of the ‘financial institution’ has not been specified, the company is broadly assumed to be Goldman, where Aleynikov was earning $400,000 a year. Eek – Talk about biting the hand that feeds you! Though we shouldn’t feel too bad for Goldman…they do expect nothing less than blood, sweat and tears from their employees…

The stolen code is allegedly part of a program that allows for trades at the best prices. According to the complaint, the “financial institution has devoted substantial resources to developing and maintaining a computer platform that allows the financial institution to engage in sophisticated, high-speed, and high-volume trades on various stock and commodities markets.”

So how was Aleynikov’s corporate espionage scheme discovered? Apparently vigilant Goldman noted an unusually large amount of data (32MB) being uploaded from its servers via HTTPS transfers. A little alarm bell went off, and subsequent investigation led straight to Aleynikov’s computer.

His lawyer maintains that Goldman was well aware that Aleynikov uploaded data on a regular basis – he has three small kids and works from home a lot. Further in support of Aleynikov’s innocence is the fact that when he was arrested at the airport just prior to the July 4 holiday weekend, he waived his Miranda rights and spoke to the FBI at length…this is not the mark of a guilty man.

pic courtesy of mlblogs.com

Deloitte’s new counter-espionage force will be headed up by Steve Cummings, a former director of the Centre for the Protection of the National Infrastructure (CPNI). His team will be composed of consultants (of course) with experience in both government and business intelligence.

After what one might argue to be a more far-reaching intelligence role, Cummings isn’t taking the Deloitte gig lightly:

“In a globalized world where the threat from terrorism seems more pressing, it is easy for companies to make the mistake of thinking that espionage carried out by competitors or states is a thing of the past.

“Yet many businesses face a greater threat of attacks against valued information which can have a direct effect on their commercial success and longer term business strategies, or against intellectual property which has a high commercial value.”

Cummings believes that for companies to really fight corporate espionage successfully, they must train their staff appropriately on matters of security and combine this education with “effective technical and non-technical controls.”

pic courtesy of zdnet.com

For three decades, Dongfan (aka Greg) Chung – now 73 – allegedly stole more than a quarter million sensitive documents from his workplace (first Rockwell Intl and then Boeing) and passed them on to the Chinese, without anyone in the U.S catching on. When charged in court on Tuesday with counts of conspiracy, economic espionage, lying to the feds, obstructing justice and acting as a foreign agent, Chung pleaded innocent.

According to the prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Greg Staples, some of the documents Chung pilfered had secret info on the U.S. space shuttle’s phased array antenna, the Delta IV booster rocket and how to solder metal for space resistance. This may not seem like a big deal, but the prosecution highlighted the importance of the smallest details, saying: “You can call it God or you can call it the devil, but it is success that is in the details and it is the details that the government is going to show the defendant had in his house and collected for the PRC [People’s Republic of China]. The details,” Staples continued, “are the difference between getting into space and ending up with a plaything for children in a park.”

Chung’s attorney, Tom Bienert, said the government would not be able to prove his client did anything wrong, but just in case, he still trivialized the contents of the data allegedly stolen and sent to China.

Chung was working for Boeing as a stress analysis consultant in 2006 when the FBI began sniffing around. He was subsequently fired. According to the government, he started spying for his home country in the 1970s – soon after becoming a U.S. citizen and starting to work for Rockwell International (which was later bought out by Boeing).

One of the pieces of evidence that the government refers to is a letter in which Chung purportedly tells a Chinese contact of his that he has sent lots of information regarding flight stress analysis to China via ship. In the letter, he allegedly makes his motives for doing so crystal clear:

“Having been a Chinese compatriot for over thirty years and being proud of the achievements by the people’s efforts for the motherland, I am regretful for not contributing anything. …I would like to make an effort to contribute to the Four Modernizations of China.”

How did the authorities get onto Chung’s trail in the first place? They were investigating Chinese spy Chi Mak – convicted in 2007 of conspiring to export U.S. defense technology to China and sentenced to 24+ years in prison – and found a handy little address book at Mak’s residence. Both the address book and a letter pointed the FBI in Chung’s direction…

images courtesy of www.ocregister.com and www.cicentre.com

Recently, Shin Bet (Israel’s equivalent of the FBI), issued a warning to Israelis telling them to be cautious as there have been attempts by terrorist groups to recruit agents via Facebook and other social networking sites.

Shin Bet reports that there have been several recent incidents in which Arab terrorists have attempted recruiting with direct online contact or by arranging seemingly innocuous meetings with “friends” they make online.

Leaking classified information over the Internet is not brand new, as Shin Bet in the past few years has interrogated and tried numerous Israelis for just this infraction. The security service said in a statement that they “fear classified information may have been leaked, endangering the lives of Israelis who could be enticed to meet abroad with Internet contacts who have offered them deals.”

Apparently, terrorists looking for recruits trawl sites popular with Israelis and aim especially to connect with soldiers who have served with covert units of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).

Recently, an Israeli Facebook user was approached online by a man identifying himself only as “a Lebanese agent.” He offered the Israeli money in exchange for classified intel. The Israeli notified Shin Bet and cut off contact with the alleged agent.

Shin Bet has advised Israelis to remove all personal information from their profiles, whether they be on Facebook or other networks. That means no email addresses, phone numbers, mailing addresses or even birth years. Probably not a bad thing for Facebook users in other countries to take heed of as well.

What’s next? Hezbollah following people on Twitter??

Ok – it’s not 100% fair to depict the FBI as totally behind the times. Over the past few years, they have rolled out a number of online initiatives, including an email alert service and news feeds, podcasts and widgets. They’ve made it easier for the public to submit tips on crime and terrorism, helping the FBI to track down fugitives and missing children.

The FBI’s just announced its next step in the techie trend – presence on interactive social media sites.

•    Facebook: follow news, check out photos and videos, and become a fan of the FBI
•    YouTube: watch videos and connect back to the main FBI website for job postings and other content
•    Twitter: become a follower of the FBI and receive tweets on breaking news and other useful info

John Miller, the head of the FBI’s public affairs, says: “To reach out to the public, we need to be where people are – and we know tens of millions of people spend their time in social media sites. Adding our fugitives, missing kids, threat and scam warnings, and other information into these sites is an extension of what we’ve done for decades – enlisting the help and support of concerned citizens around the globe to keep communities safer.”

Seems like a great idea, Mr. Miller.

In addition to the above, an FBI Most Wanted application has been built for the iPhone. More than 350,000 people in 80 countries have downloaded the app since it launched in February. Version 2 of the app will use GPS data to allow users to submit tips directly to their local FBI offices. Another app currently still in development stages will focus on missing kids, sharing alerts, pics and data to help in the location of missing children.

Props to the FBI for making it extra easy for people to stay connected and help out.