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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.
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/
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?
$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?
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.
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
That has a low-tech solution. Do what my (very large) company does and have Windows NT as the standard desktop. No USB support. Shithouse when you need to run any software made this century but hey! no USB support!
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.
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...
I'm hoping your questions is rhetorical. Let me give you a few examples:
No, I will not work for your startup