Sing-along! "Every single day, Every word you say, I'll be watching you."

Executives who often work on the move or in public places had better be more discreet about their business conversations and documents.

A survey in Britain and the United States, released last week, found that eavesdropping in public places was common.

Information exchanged during supposedly private business conversations were also used by others for their own advantage, according to survey findings.

Conducted by flexible work solutions provider Regus, the survey found that 67 per cent of Britons had listened in on someone else's business conversation while they were in public places.

Americans were also guilty of this act - 59 per cent of those polled did just that.

Besides eavesdropping, the habit of sneaking a peek at other people's business documents in public places, such as while on the train, was also not unheard of.

Nearly two out of five British professionals (35 per cent) and 34 per cent of Americans surveyed said they had caught sight of other people's sensitive company documents.

And the shocking thing was that 13 per cent of Britons and 19 per cent of Americans said they were able to use the information overheard for their own business purposes. (more)

Larry, The IT Guy (No... make that, Spy)

Security Directors, CEOs, Chief Legal Counsels:
Immediately after you read this, make sure you have a clear, concise written policy in place detailing allowable IT behavior.

One in three IT administrators say they or one of their colleagues have used top-level admin passwords to pry into confidential or sensitive information at their workplace, according to a survey by a password-management vendor.

Nearly half also confessed that they have poked around systems for information not relevant to their jobs.

"We asked these questions last year, too," said Adam Bosnian, vice president of product strategy and sales for Cyber-Ark, a Newton, Mass.-based maker of password file security management software. "And we got similar results. So on one hand, the results weren't surprising. What was surprising initially -- and this time around, too -- is that people admit to it." (more)

Remind Employees - "Don't sing!"

One in five U.S. workers regularly attends after-work drinks with co-workers, where the most common mishaps range from bad-mouthing another worker to kissing a colleague and drinking too much, according to a study... (survey conducted for CareerBuilder.com)

As to what happens when the after-work drinks flow... Five percent said they had shared a secret about the company, and 4 percent confessed to singing karaoke.

Overall, 21 percent of workers attend happy hours with co-workers and, of those, nearly a quarter go at least once a month. (more)

Spy News of the Week

Sweden - "Earlier this week the Swedish stasi-government decided -- against the peoples wishes -- to wiretap all internet and telephone traffic in order to protect Sweden against threats. As you all know, being a neutral country makes Sweden a target for all the terrorists of the world, apparently," blogs one of The Pirate Bay's admins, Peter Sunde. "Many people have asked me what we're planning to do -- and the answer is 'A lot!'. This week we're going to add SSL to The Pirate Bay. We're also going to help out making a website about easy encryption -- both for your hard drives and your net traffic." (more)

Germany - German incumbent Deutsche Telekom is going to get yet another scolding. German public television channel ZDF reported the former operator turned self-spying agency wire tapped a few customers. Apparently 120 calls were illegally tapped by the company, without any court order or involvement of the police. (more)

UK - Every council in England will today be instructed to stop using tough laws to spy on people over "trivial matters" such as dog-fouling and litter offences. (more)

New Zealand - A 21-year-old peeping tom has been caught spying on his female neighbour in Dunedin. The Otago University student was nabbed peering through a flat window just before 9pm yesterday. (more)

India - This year the Delhi University saw many of the "spy students" hired by private detective agencies being roped in by parents to keep an eye on their wards. However... a growing number of students are visiting detective agencies and are offering handsome amounts to them to know whether their parents have hired any "spy students", mainly girls, to keep a watch on their activities. (more)

United States - Xiaodong Sheldon Meng, 44, who was raised in China and holds Canadian citizenship, was sentenced on the rare charge of committing economic espionage against the U.S. It's the most serious crime under the Economic Espionage Act of 1996 and involves stealing trade secrets to benefit a foreign government. (more)

South Africa - The bugging devices of the former dispensation, which were used in foreign embassies in South Africa and had been planted by an espionage front company, are still being used. (more)

Switzerland - A left-wing campaign group asked Swiss authorities on Friday to investigate Swiss food and drinks giant Nestle SA for allegedly hiring a spy to infiltrate the group. A Swiss chapter of anti-globalization group Attac filed the legal complaint in Vaud canton (state), after learning that an employee of Securitas AG security company took part in its private meetings between late 2003 and June 2004... (more)

United States - US information security company Cyber-Ark surveyed 300 senior IT professionals, and found that one-third admitted to secretly snooping, while 47 per cent said they had accessed information that was not relevant to their role. (more)

Bulgaria - A man applied for a job as an industrial spy. Together with several other applicants, he was given a sealed envelope and told to take it to the fourth floor. As soon as the man was alone, he stepped into an empty hallway and opened the envelope. Inside, a message read: "You're our kind of person. Report to the fifth floor Personnel Office." (source)

Report: C-level execs more involved with security

The major data breaches that have received mass media coverage are driving so-called "C-level" executives to become actively involved in their organization's security policies, according to a new report from the (ISC)2.

There are several key "take-aways" from the report, titled "2008 (ISC)2 Global Information Security Workforce" and authored by Rob Ayoub, Frost & Sullivan's network security industry manager.

Ayoub told SCMagazineUS.com that these include the fact that C-level executives are paying attention to security...

"CEOs are asking their security professionals important questions about how they're prepared to not become another TJX," (answers) (more)

Who's Watching You at Work?

"Surveillance is now routine business practice among American employers, both large and small, as the cost and ease of introducing have dropped. You leave your rights at the office door every day you go to work. Most surveillance is conducted without any individualized suspicion, and personal as well as business-related information is routinely collected," explained Jeremy Gruber, legal director at the National Workrights Institute.

Two-thirds of the companies included in the "2007 Electronic Monitoring & Surveillance Survey" said they monitor Internet connections. (more)

Spy Agency’s Eavesdropping Rose Last Year

S. Korea - The Broadcasting and Communications Commission (BCC) said Thursday that the number of eavesdropping requests from the spy agency and police last year was the highest since 2004, while the number of cases of e-mail monitoring and caller identification also rose.

Telephone companies allowed the National Intelligence Service (NIS), police officials and prosecutors to tap 1,142 phone calls last year, up from 1,062 cases in 2006. Most of the requests were from the NIS, the spy agency.

The number of caller identification requests from investigation authorities also increased by more than 20 percent to 183,659 cases from 150,743, the BCC said. E-mail monitoring rose 28.9 percent to 326 cases.

Furthermore, the actual number of eavesdropping cases can be higher than the released figure since multiple requests on a single case are counted as one, the BCC said. (more)

Court-Approved Wiretapping Rose 14% in '07

Last year might have been a rough year for U.S. home prices, but growth in government wiretaps remained healthy, with the eavesdropping sector posting a 14% increase in court orders compared to 2006.

In 2007, judges approved 4,578 state and federal wiretaps, as compared to 4,015 in 2006, according to two new reports on criminal and intelligence wiretaps.

State investigators are increasingly turning to wiretaps, according to newly released statistics. State police applied for 27% more wiretaps in 2007 than in 2006, with 94% of them targeting cell phones, according to figures released by the U.S. Courts' administrator.

In 2007, state judges approved 1,751 criminal wiretap applications, without turning any of them down, according to the report (.pdf). That's a near-three fold increase in state wiretaps since 1997. (more)

...and, 85% declined to answer.

"Me, My Spouse and the Internet"
Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford,
Survey Results...
• 20% of married Internet users admitted to reading their partner’s emails and text messages; and
• 13% to having checked their partner’s browser history.
More than 6,000 married people were invited to take part in the study. The final sample involved 929 couples, with both partners completing a questionnaire. (more) (Project website.)

Surveillance Desensitization Continues

Hal Niedzviecki writes...
I ask (Ursula) Lebana how things have changed since she opened Canada’s first spy store back in 1991.

“People who came into the store at that time were quite shocked,” she tells me. “They never realized cameras were that small. They said, ‘Oh my God, that’s scary. And isn’t it terrible to monitor the nanny? Where’s the trust?’”

Sixteen years later, business is booming. “Now people say, ‘Oh, I want a hidden camera,’” says Lebana, who has since opened SpyTech locations in Ottawa and London, Ontario. “They are more willing to use them now. They’re more familiar with it. I’m even getting repeat customers... (more)

Hot Boardroom Topic - Counterespionage

Security is becoming a board-level issue as the number of cyber-attacks and corporate espionage incidents are growing significantly each year...

Few people would dispute the mystique that surrounds the boardroom. This allure has been around for some time, but it was recently heightened by the popular TV series "The Apprentice" with business icon Donald Trump. Boards of directors deal with sensitive issues and handle privileged information, and board meetings themselves call to mind strategy discussion, stock discussions and major contracts.

Taking advantaged of privileged information is illegal. As you can imagine, access to privileged financial and stock information could easily be used for insider trading. The sensitive information and financial data must be controlled in order to comply with Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure requirements.

What you may not think of are the discussions around information security, which has become a board-level issue. Cyber-attacks and corporate espionage are growing significantly year-over-year. In a training program developed by Spy-Ops, the company notes that corporate espionage worldwide is now more than a trillion-dollar problem annually and growing. Data breaches, theft of intellectual property, insider trading and other criminal acts now demand the attention of the board of directors.

"Enterprise risk management discussions and strategies have moved into the executive suites and boardrooms. This is due primarily to the significant implications associated with security breaches," said Paula Cordaro of Spy-Ops. (more)

7 Security Rules Employees Love to Break

Research from the Ponemon Institute finds that either companies are not setting, or employees are not following, data security procedures in several high-risk areas.

“Data Security Policies Are Not Enforced,” a survey of 893 corporate IT workers, examined the risks associated with storing and transporting sensitive information and looked at how well companies are implementing and enforcing policies to protect against this risk.

1. Copying confidential information onto a USB memory stick.
2. Accessing web-based e-mail accounts from a workplace computer.
3. Losing a portable data-bearing device.
4. Downloading personal software onto a company computer.
5. Sending workplace documents as an attachment in e-mail.
6. Disabling security and firewall settings.
7. Sharing passwords with co-workers.
(more)

from EnergyBiz Magazine...
"Corporate espionage is big business. According to the FBI, such theft costs all U.S. companies between $24 billion and $100 billion annually. Interestingly, only about 20 percent of those losses are tied to cyber threats while the majority of them are associated with low-tech schemes such as unlawfully entering open offices." (more)
Eavesdropping, and low-tech espionage tricks, precede cyber-threats. They are also the easiest to spot. Discover the eavesdropping and espionage attacks and the cyber-threats die of starvation. The security secret... You have to look, to discover – on a regular basis. Start your schedule of detection audits, today.

Every Click You Make, Your Boss Is Watching You

Employees who regularly use company computers to surf the Web, sign on to business accounts for personal e-mail, make calls from company phones or use the corporate car to run errands run the risk of losing their jobs, according to a new survey released by The ePolicy Institute and the American Management Association (AMA).

More than 58 percent of the 304 companies surveyed said they'd fired workers for misusing company-provided e-mail accounts or improper use of the Internet on a company computer. A much smaller portion, 6 percent, said they had terminated an employee for inappropriate use of a company phone or voice mail. (more)

Using Your Mobile to Spy on Your Spouse

ALK Technologies, a New Jersey-based company selling software that turns cell phones and PDAs into satellite tracking devices, asked men and women if, given the chance, they would like to use mobile phones to spy on their partner’s comings and goings 24/7. Two times as many women as men polled—some 63% vs. 29%—said they would like to track the movements of their mates. Interestingly, only 44% of women and 41% of men wanted the roles to be reversed and to be tracked by the people they are spying on.

The survey showed that the younger they are, the more jealous people tend to be: Some 56% of 18- to 29-year olds said they would seize the opportunity to snoop, compared to 45% of people aged 41 to 50. People older than that are either more secure or don’t care anymore. Only one-fifth of people 51 to 60 wanted to know where their mates were at every moment. (more)

Survey - More Women Hiring Private Investigators

Women are increasingly employing private investigators to check on their cheating husbands, a new survey of divorce lawyers shows today.

With extra-marital affairs the main reason for the break-up of marriage, more than two in three lawyers surveyed last year had at least one client who had used a private investigator to find out if their spouse was being unfaithful.

In two thirds of the cases it was women who were checking on husbands, the survey of 100 lawyers by Grant Thornton’s forensic and investigation services shows. (more)

Private investigators: no longer in the shadows
Once it was the murky world of dirty raincoats and skulking in shadows. But the private investigator is now fast becoming a standard aid to divorce.

Paul Hawkes, 49, has run his own firm, Research Associates, in West London, for 31 years. “Last year I had probably 100 to 200 cases involving checking on extra-marital affairs,” he said. “Ten years ago it would have been fewer 50.”

One reason for the change was that women in particular, who were the bulk of the clients, were now far more “pragmatic” and “not prepared to suffer in silence or sweep things under the bed. Now they want to know what is going on.” (more)

Global Info Survey - CIO's Get Smart

A growing number of organizations recognize information security can provide more than just protection of corporate assets, with the delivery of IT and operational efficiencies and improving overall business performance emerging as critical objectives. That is the word from Ernst & Young's 10th annual global information security survey. The survey canvassed nearly 1,300 senior executives in more than 50 countries. (more)

2007 Electronic Monitoring & Surveillance Survey:

Over Half of All Employers Combined Fire Workers for E-Mail & Internet Abuse

From e-mail monitoring and Website blocking to phone tapping and GPS tracking, employers increasingly combine technology with policy to manage productivity and minimize litigation, security, and other risks. To motivate compliance with rules and policies, more than one fourth of employers have fired workers for misusing e-mail and nearly one third have fired employees for misusing the Internet, according to the 2007 Electronic Monitoring & Surveillance Survey from American Management Association (AMA) and The ePolicy Institute. (more)

"And, the Number One security threat is..."

"YOU!"

When it comes to security, human threats score much higher than those posed by technology. So says a new survey by consulting firm Deloitte of more than 100 technology, media and telecommunications companies worldwide. (more)

72% of Scots against CCTV eavesdropping

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) launched its new CCTV code of practice at the Scottish Parliament today, and also released details of a survey of a thousand people in Scotland.

Seventy-two per cent of respondents to the survey were against CCTV cameras which record conversations. This supports an earlier survey in London and South East England which produced similar results (70% against). (more)

To eavesdrop, or not - teenage opinions

Q. Should the federal government be allowed to listen in on phone conversations of Americans and to read their e-mails and other information on their computers without their knowledge and without a warrant? (answers)

World's Best Places to... Keep it to Yourself

Individual privacy is best protected in Canada but is under threat in the United States and the European Union as governments introduce sweeping surveillance and information-gathering measures in the name of security and border control, an international rights group said in a report.

Canada, Greece and Romania had the best privacy records of 47 countries surveyed by London-based watchdog Privacy International. Malaysia, Russia and China were ranked worst.

Both Britain and the United States fell into the lowest-performing group of "endemic surveillance societies." (more)

Industrial Spying Threatens Local Firms

S. Korea - Concerns have re-emerged over the illegal transfer of high technology abroad, which has been worsening in recent years, in the wake of the latest leak case in which industrial spies handed over key automobile building technology of Hyundai Motor to Chinese firms.

Prosecutors Friday arrested two Hyundai Motor employees, who stole core technology for the automatic transmission of a sports utility vehicle (SUV) that the carmaker has developed with an investment of 300 billion won ($323 million) for two years, to a Chinese carmaker.

Experts estimate the leaked information could cause trillions of won in damages...

Samsung Electronics, for example, has already adopted an advanced security system in its Digital Media Research Center, where each researcher’s location can be traced through satellite-recognized identification cards, in addition to anti-eavesdropping devices. (more)

Spyware tops list of threats in CompTIA survey

Spyware has become the biggest security threat to organizations, a survey from the Computer Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) has discovered. That's a big change from a few years ago, when spyware was barely even considered a threat. (more)

Lax USB stick security causing havoc

According to a straw poll carried out at Infosecurity Europe last month, 90 per cent of the 12,000 attendees routinely carried portable storage devices. The survey also showed that 80 per cent of visitors believed their company had lost valuable confidential data through the use of these devices.

SmartLine, a developer of network management and end-point security offerings, conducted a short survey on its stand.

"Although these gadgets are designed to be perfectly harmless, it does not take much for them to become a major security headache. It is all too easy to use them to siphon off valuable data.

"Even legitimate users can simply lose the device, or have it stolen. Organisations need to ensure that they have the right security measures in place to protect themselves from this type of data leakage."(more)

Some companies stamp their logos onto USB sticks and use them as give-a-ways. Keep in mind that this may be the perfect Trojan Horse gift - if pre-loaded with spyware, the infection begins the second you plug it in. Don't let visitors stick you either. ~ Kevin

Spy Agency Resorts to Wiretapping More Often

S. Korea - The National Intelligence Service (NIS), the country’s spy agency, is wiretapping more and more fixed-line phones and tracking the e-mail messages of Koreans.

The Ministry of Information and Communication on Tuesday said the NIS traced a total of 8,440 phones or messages last year, up 4.4 percent from 8,082 in 2005. (more)

"...and the winner for Wiretapping is..."

Italy!!!!!

Britain may have more CCTV cameras per head than anywhere else in the world but when it comes to electronic surveillance the country is way behind Italy, the Netherlands and even Sweden. ... Italy leads the world with 76 intercepts per 100,000 head of population, shortly ahead of the Netherlands (62), and with third-placed Sweden some way back (33). Germany comes in fourth with 23.5 intercepts per 100,000 head of population with England and Wales trailing on six intercepts per head of population. (more)

Washington's CIA Leak Case Comes to a Close

CNN - The verdict by an 11 member jury comes after a nearly two year ordeal. Libby resigned from Cheney's staff in 2005, after he was charged with lying to investigators about the leak about the identity of Valerie Plame....a CIA operative. Lawyers for Libby originally stated Libby learned about Plame from Cheney, then forgot, then learned about her again from NBC's Tim Russert. The defense said Libby had a bad memory -- blaming it on his busy schedule as a top White House aide. (more)

During the first week of this story, George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh tried their creative hands at predicting what had happened, on "K-Street."

"HBO's latest groundbreaking series is an experimental fusion of reality and fiction--an entertaining, fly-on-the-wall look at government, filmed in and around the corridors of power in Washington. Starring Beltway insiders James Carville, Mary Matalin, Michael Deaver--and a host of political celebrities." We were there.

See a brief video clip of our sweep for the Valerie Plame bugs here. The full episode occasionally airs on HBO OnDemand. Full series available on DVD.

Spy Hard II

The press is having fun with this one, but keep in mind that talented people, working under extreme pressures, working "24", with limited information will make more than the normal amount of mistakes. Being able to admit one's mistakes is admirable, too. ~Kevin

UK - An official report into the actions of Britain's spies has left them looking more like the bumbling French detective Inspector Clouseau than swish, sophisticated James Bond.

It reveals they make an "unacceptably high" level of blunders.

More than 4,000 errors were recorded in a 15-month period, including tapping the wrong telephones and intercepting post from a suspect's address even though he had moved house.

It is the first report of its kind from Sir Swinton Thomas, the outgoing Interception of Communications Commissioner. ...

The most common mistake was simply entering the wrong telephone number on a tapping warrant. (more) (more)

The important part of this report went under-reported...
The long-established principle that the phones of MPs and peers cannot be tapped by the security services places them above the law and could prevent investigations into serious crime or terrorism, the prime minister's eavesdropping watchdog warned yesterday.

Sir Swinton Thomas urged Tony Blair to overrule objections by MPs, including some cabinet ministers, to the phone tap ban. (more)

InfoSecurity tops list of executive worries

The compromise of corporate information systems is the number-one worry of business executives, according to a survey of 197 senior executives at corporations with $1 billion or more in annual revenue.

The survey, conducted by Harris Interactive, revealed that 61 percent of the executives cited data breaches as their biggest worry. (more)