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HOWTO Commit Corporate Espionage
bart_scriv writes "Worried about who might be spying at your company? Businessweek looks at the latest in espionage gadgets and technology in response to the recent HP boardroom scandal. The article looks at devices designed for counter-espionage, which range from mundane confidential email services to sophisticated camera and listening-device detectors. '...for every method of spying, there's a counteroffensive. One of them is the eavesdropping protection kit, manufactured by Dynasound in Norcross, Ga. To secure a room in an office building, devices are placed on ceiling plenums, floors, HVAC ducts, doors, walls or windows — basically anywhere voices can travel.'"
WHO GOES THERE? Another protection: vanishing e-mail. Called VaporStream, the system lets people send e-mails that cannot be tracked, copied, forwarded, or printed--leaving no trail. Users pay $39.99 a year to subscribe to the service and must log into the site every time they want to send a confidential e-mail. Wow, I'm sure nobody will ever find a way to print it out or take a screenshot of it.
Do these guys also sell a cell phone built into a shoe, go to with the cone of silence?
Where were you when the voynix came?
Along with the obvious requisites like the bedroom and the seperate airconditioning (he was the only person in the building allowed to smoke!), the windows were double-glazed and had a white-noise generator in between the panes to foil any sneaky lasers from other oil companies' CBD high-rises!
I was at first bemused at the expense of it all, but then I thought about the millions he'd get as salary, and the hundreds of millions affected by the decisions made in that office, and thought better of it...
God knows I don't get anything out of our meetings, so how some industrial spy is supposed to is beyond me. Serve them right if they absorb non-productivity osmotically...
Meta will eat itself
Problem Solved.
How about a thumbdrive? With capacities seemingly doubling every couple months, it should be real easy to swipe off a good amount of data.
just pay someone that has access and an excellent memory.
Finding someone that has photographic memory and lacks ethical guidance is left as an exercise for the reader.
Note that corporate espionage for the purpose of uncovering Trade Secrets is generally illegal in the U.S. That's why companies mark documents as "proprietary," for instance; doing so identifies the document as something that the company considers a trade secret. If you use corporate espionage techniques to obtain such a document (i.e., if the company doesn't exercise due diligence in making sure that such documents aren't publicly disclosed) then relevant Trade Secret laws would apply.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_secret
I hope that after I die the one word people use to describe me is "resurrected."
cvs commit -m "added more theft options." corporate_espionage.c
When I tell an object to delete this, am I killing it or telling it to kill me?
Sure, I've collected all this great data, but now how to I find a buyer? Do I just walk up to the competition's CEO and say "Hey, I got the goods on company XYZ, how much is that worth to you?" Do I take out an ad in the paper... or 2600? I need real answers.
Seriously. I want this to be my full time job, but this article doesn't tell you shite.
Sometimes it's as easy as walking by to get all the info you need.
http://flickr.com/photos/reboof/259086845/
Cone of Silence.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
.. that you'll pay your money, open the boxes they send you to find that they all contain egg cartons and a few tubes of pritt-stick?
OK, so Slashdot is famous for putting marketing FUD on its main page, but even I don't get how putting anti-spy devices in would have prevented the head of HP from spying on people. (I can imagine the work order crossing the CEO's desk: "Hmmm...here's a request from some peon for a company anti-spy installation to prevent what I'm up to. Denied, ya' think?")
Thank you, Slashdot, for putting up a page with this title for me to read over the company's network. I was getting ready to be fired soon anyhow.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
If you have access to the network racks it's easier than you might think. Plug a microphone into an empty network socket, a patch lead from the microphone socket to a socket in your office, and an amplifier plugs into the wall socket in your office. Boardroom meetings were bugged like this for six years by a friend of mine and nobody noticed a thing.
Bug sweeps might not find anything because no RF is emitted.
If you aren't doing anything evil why do you need secrecy (or privacy)?
Because I don't like to be spied on. The thought of people going through my personal files or even listening in on my private conversations creeps me out. I also don't like to use public restrooms with the stall door open, and I don't live in a completely transparent house.
If I'm a business, I want privacy because I don't want my competitors learning information about my future plans or strategies that they could use to their advantage. If I have a product that I've spent billions researching and developing, I don't want my competitor to steal it and start selling it before I do.
If you aren't doing anything evil why do you need secrecy (or privacy)?
The government always follows this saying with "Do as I say not as we do." BTW Nice sig.
Can I bum a sig?
and we learn this from the most amusing of monkeys: the federal government.
i support the right to offend.
$6000 and up for a white noise generator? WTF?? Anyone with basic electronics skills can build one with parts that will cost about $10. Anyone with basic coding skills can code one for free in about 10 min.
Am I getting something wrong here, or did corporate greed just get worse?
Bugging an office has never been easier, now that data cables run into all of them!
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
After reading you sig thanks to the mention it got from someone else, I was wondering, wouldn't it be easy to make the argument that goverments who fear their people are just as apt to by tyranicle. I mean the USSR feared it's people so it sent them to prisions in sibera or worse for trival reasons. The same can be said about Sadam's goverment and probably many others. I mean it seems that all tyrnaical goverments fear the people and fear that they will learn and rise up and thus the goverments rule with an iron fist. So maybe it should be when goverments repsect their people their is freedom. I guess that just doesnt have the same ring to it....
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
Most of the toys mentioned in article are pretty lame and sucky. Granted, for the PI or Spy that buys everything off-the-shelf, the counter-surveilance mentioned works, but otherwise it sucks, here's why (pont by point)
White-noise generators assume that You have no access to the room or that it is impossible to plant a small piece on the person. Say, bump in "accidentally" into the CEO in question and place a 5 square milimeter chip. It will have an internal clock and mic. Once the CEO is out in fresh air, it will transmit the data back in one encrypted burst and destroy the information it had.
Pretty much the same applies for cameras. One, you assume they are broadcasting within some pre-defined spectrum and do so all the time. Again, do a remote on/off or encrypted packet burst and such suverlance mechanisms fail. Besides, with advent of WiFi, if your super agent picks up emissions in 2.4Ghz range, he'll assume it's wifi and let it rest. Also, you can sramble the transmission, do a frequeny hop and bob knows what else.
About that phone-line tap: Do we live in dark ages? Nobody has analogue phones and taps that feed off phone current.You can't detect it over ISDN lines (most offices) and it deosn't do anything for cell networks.
No comments on vapourstream :)
I have to admit, that the laser window snooping is the most effective in the list, as it is probably the easiest method and most reliable. For nice security, go low-tech : Have a friendly chat near a cooler (no windows), in a bath-house (most devices choke on humid air, transmission also would suck) or in a pool or sea (waves splashing, children, loud music).
Besides, the entire chain of communications should be scure, aka TEMPEST approach - if once bit of wire is not tempest - entire chain is invalid. If one of the two persons in conversation, repeats what he heard over dinner table with his wife - what's the point?Lone Gunmen crew.
Purchase a bunch of simple RJ45 "protective caps" or covers and use them in all of the unused outlets in the room. You could then modify one of the caps to contain the microphone without looking out of place.
a p/image/img.jpg
http://www2.elecom.co.jp/cable/accessory/ld-rj45c
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
the US / NSA has been proven to use echelon for industrial espionage in other countries eg. on Enercon in Germany: www.europarl.eutopa.eu, search for "Enercon" . It's quite difficult to find anything in English on this, but there's a lot of stuff in German about this case.
k2r
Sounds like you've got the kind of envrionment that precipitates Bozon Cloud formation ...
Bozon: A quantum unit of stupidity.
This term I picked up from Headcrash (Roadkill on the Information Superhighway) by Bruce Bethke. A very entertaining read, I might add. Bruce himself is a great guy too, as I discovered while he was our Special Guest at the last Chattacon (a Science-Fiction convention in Chattanooga). I could say something about the ProctoProd(tm), but I don't want to ruin the book.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Try a Wall Clock with a wifi camera and microphone.
Something like this: http://www.spycameras.com/item4.htm
I'd look for a more real office type wall clock, but you get the idea. After all, what corporate meeting room doesn't have wifi?
Sorry the mods' sarcasm detectors are on the fritz this morning...
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
In a related story, it was found in a co-relation study that there was a relationship between privacy advocation and parental status. It was found that parents with even a single child over the age of 6 months have learned to give less than a shit about privacy.
What does one have to do with the other? The HP scandal revolves around a leak at the very top-- a member of the board of directors who supplied inside information directly to journalists. What the heck do all these amateurish gadgets have to do with anything? And how is being aware of them or being able to protect oneself from them of any value when one of your own board members is giving information to the press? There's no technological silver bullet for that kind of problem. Trying to connect these two subjects is just silly.
If privacy is removed from the workplace, potential whistleblowers will not be able to do disclose information when companies do things that break laws (wether moral or juridical).
Of course, it can also be difficult to hear the person on the other end of the phone.
Loose lips lose spit.
It stops both of them.
Best Slashdot Co
Woot! Secret decoder rings! Invisible ink! See-bak-ro-scopes! And that great key to popularity, "Fool your friends!"
And those X-Ray Specs... (do they really see through clothing? Better get a pair, it's the only way to find out! And even if you can't, you always get a reaction by pretending they do...)
Gee whillikers, CEOs must be saying to themselves, now that I'm a big-deal important person, I can send away for ALL that stuff! Boy, will my friends be impressed when they realize my words are so important that other people are trying to overhear them... and that I have the wherewithal to spend tens of thousands on impressive-looking gadgets.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
$12.95 for a radio.......
Go to a garage sale and buy a TV put it on channel 13 with no antenna
White noise generator
Defeat laser listener
Place radio on window sill with sub woofer pointed at glass
Stop all eaves dropping
don't talk us a #2 pencil and legal pad
Shred the pad then burn the shredded paper then put the ashes in a bucket of water
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
...He is either lying or has a hard problem keeping sensitive things to himself. They (the DoD) wouldn't release classified information like that to a potential employee.
Since you comply there is no reason to spy on you.
I developed a secure phone software to be used by corporate users against espionage. It uses a Microsoft PocketPc or Smartphone, encrypt the voice using AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) with 256 bits key and uses Elliptic Curve Cryptography to do key exchange (ECDH 571 bits). I don't know if into US the corporate people can use this kind of huge cryptography. My site is at http://www.raseac.com.br/ I think if your corporate people want some privacy, this product is a good solution.
I'm hoping your questions is rhetorical. Let me give you a few examples:
No, I will not work for your startup
i guess i'm not the only one who is a bot dissapointed by these spy gadgets, since they all seem a bit wannabe-james-bond.
anybody know of real high-tech (or highly sneaky) gadgets that real spies use or used?
one of my favourites was the Great Seal Bug
Given the simple principle these things work on (voice transmission over crypto wrapped data channel) the prices charged for them are generally plain rediculous, and I've seen them all over the planet.
Furthermore, unless the source is available for the product it will not be subjected to independent review, and any claim that it's thus 'the best' or even 'secure' is thus meaningless, as is your website claim "no backdoors to our knowledge". That claim would still be valid if you allowed a US NSA official some time alone in the room with the code prior to compilation. You wouldn't know then, would you? All of these claims also assume that the base platform itself (WinCE) is uncompromised which is in itself amusing and unprovable.
BTW, for someone really in need of secure comms, Due Diligence on the product and product comparison would be a minimum requirement and the above is enough to delist yours from such a process.
Sorry to rain on your self advertising, but a bit more substance would be a good idea. Otherwise you're just competing with other snake oil vendors, and I've seen enough security BS over the last few months to last me a lifetime.
= Ch =
Insert
If you are conducting business about which you don't want others to know, then face-to-face is still the best. A wooded area, away from buildings, on a windy day is just good practice. Finally, never do shady things with people you haven't known all your life.
Goddamned kids! Get off my lawn!
If you aren't doing anything evil why do you need secrecy (or privacy)?
Heh, I realize that this poster is only trying to get a rise out of the rest of us, but I thought I might post in response to this.
I find it interesting that every time privacy is brought up, this is the phrase that we hear EVERY time. However, I never hear anyone ask them a simple question in response --- "Do you close the door when using the public restroom?" Think about it, you close the door because you really don't want to be bothered, or bother others when partaking of the facilities. Do you keep the door on your house closed? Do you publicly post your account balance and how much you do, or do not, make at your job? Do you make your health records public?
The answers to these questions are exactly why there are privacy measures. Somethings are important to me that I do not want you knowing. Some people are more careful about the information they allow out than others, but being as we are in the USA, we enjoy the right we have to privacy.
Simply put, the simple response to that stupid statement is a series of equally stupid questions.
Here I come to save the da... *thud*
I gotta get me a shorter cape.