Note: This was bound to happen as more and more companies become victims of Cyber Espionage. Has your company become a victim of Cyber Espionage? And, more importantly, does your company have a Cyber TSCM / Cyber Counterespionage strategy in place to mitigate this risk? 
Contact me, I can help. ~JDL

bloomberg.com

crn.com

computerworld.com

theatlanticwire.com


For tips on sweeping a room for surreptitious surveillance devices, look no further than the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That’s where members of the federal government have been going for years to find out who’s wiretapped their telephone or implanted a microphone in their corner office. And now we know a lot more about the bureau’s routine wiretap inspections thanks to GovernmentAttic.org, a website that publishes documents from Freedom of Information Act requests. The site has published a 66MB cache of correspondence from 1952 to 1995 detailing various issues of telephone security often involving paranoid government officials from senators to post master generals to secretaries of the Department of Agriculture to President Richard Nixon who think someone is surreptitiously listening to their conversations. 

news10.net
SACRAMENTO, CA – A day after Anonymous hacked into California Statewide Law Enforcement Association’s website, CSLEA members are still learning about the security breach.

Plus, the CSLEA homepage is still down.

RELATED STORY: Thousands affected after Anonymous hacks police union website

The well-known international hacking group released the names, home addresses, and phone numbers of public safety professionals, many of them police officers. It also exposed credit card information on purchases made in their online gift shop.

Anonymous claimed on their post that they have 2,500 names and passwords, and in some cases, credit card numbers. The hacker group justified releasing the information asserting, “California law enforcement officers are notorious for brutality.”

Union president Alan Barcelona said CSLEA had information taken in November. All members who had their information breached then were contacted by phone or letter. The letter, dated Nov. 10, “confirms that credit card information of customers of the CSLEA online store had been compromised”

It stated, “Fortunately, most of the credit cards that were compromised had expired.” And, it went on to state, “Additionally, all of the information which was previously maintained on the site has been purged.”

Teresa Dobbins, an employee of the Department of Justice, never got word of the breach in November. And she wasn’t informed that her personal information, including her email address, phone number, and home address, were leaked onto the web New Year’s Day, until News 10 contacted her.

“If they were aware of it, they should have tried to notify me before the media did,” Dobbins said.

searchsecurity.techtarget.com

Every organization considering a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone system deployment hears the same dire warnings: “Routing voice calls over a data network exposes calls to eavesdropping.”

While it’s certainly true that any telephone call carries a certain degree of eavesdropping risk, is it true that VoIP calls have an inherently higher degree of risk? In this tip, we explore the ins and outs of VoIP eavesdropping.

VoIP eavesdropping is possible First, it’s important to be clear about one thing: It is absolutely possible to eavesdrop on a VoIP telephone call. It’s also possible to eavesdrop on a telephone call placed using the traditional public switched telephone network (PSTN). The difference lies in the tools and skill set needed to conduct the eavesdropping.

On a traditional telephone network, someone seeking to eavesdrop on a call generally must have physical access to either the telephone or telephone cable, at least at the initiation of the attack. This type of attack is typical in the movies. Whether it’s the good guys or the bad guys conducting the eavesdropping, someone gains access to either a telephone handset or the telephone network interface box — sometimes located outside a home or office — places a wiretap listening device on the box, and then monitors calls on an ongoing basis.

More…

washingtonpost.com

ic3.gov

variety.com
In a saga worthy of a Hollywood thriller, allegations of email hacking and industrial espionage have surfaced in the camera industry in a lawsuit filed by digital camera maker Red against rival Arri.

sfgate.com

The nation’s telecommunications companies can’t be sued for cooperating with the Bush administration’s secret surveillance program, but their customers can sue the government for allegedly intercepting their phone calls and e-mails without a warrant, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.
In a pair of decisions, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld a 2008 law immunizing AT&T and other companies for their roles in wiretapping calls to alleged foreign terrorists, but revived a suit that accused the government of illegally intercepting millions of messages from U.S. residents.
That lawsuit was partly based on testimony in 2003 by former AT&T technician Mark Klein about equipment in the company’s office on Folsom Street in San Francisco that allowed Internet traffic to be routed to the government.

‘Dragnet’ surveillance

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy-rights organization representing AT&T customers, claimed the company had similar installations in other cities and used them for “dragnet” surveillance of everyday e-mails and phone calls, which the National Security Agency purportedly screened electronically for connections to terrorism.
“We look forward to proving the program is an unconstitutional and illegal violation of the rights of millions of ordinary Americans,” said Cindy Cohn, the foundation’s legal director.
Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd declined comment.

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