Vatican Admits Secretly Bugging Its Own Clergy The Vatican admitted on Thursday that it had secretly bugged clergy within the Holy See as part of the investigation into the Vatileaks scandal, which resulted in the Pope's butler being imprisoned for stealing confidential pontifical documents. Like much of the rest of his papacy, Benedict's last day in office was overshadowed by claims of secrecy and intrigue. An Italian news magazine, Panorama, claimed that Vatican authorities had conducted, and are still conducting, an extensive covert surveillance programme, tapping the phone calls and intercepting the emails of cardinals and bishops in the Curia, the governing body of the Catholic Church. The surveillance operation was to weed out Vatican insiders who may have helped Paolo Gabriele, the butler, steal and leak to the press compromising papal documents, in a scandal that rocked the Catholic Church and reportedly contributed to...
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By jdleasure Mandiant Report
Report Fingers Chinese Military Unit in US Hack Attacks A Virginia-based cyber security firm has released a new report alleging a specific Chinese military unit is likely behind one of the largest cyber espionage and attack campaigns aimed at American infrastructure and corporations. In the report, released today by Mandiant, China's Unit 61398 is blamed for stealing "hundreds of terabytes of data from at least 141 organizations" since 2006, including 115 targets in the U.S. Twenty different industrial sectors were targeted in the attacks, Mandiant said, from energy and aerospace to transportation and financial institutions. Mandiant believes it has tracked Unit 61398 to a 12-story office building in Shanghai that could employ hundreds of workers. More here: http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/mandiant-report-fingers-chinese-military-us-hack-attacks/story?id=18537307 Read the report here: http://intelreport.mandiant.com
By jdleasure corporate espionage corporate spy
Confessions of a Corporate Spy What do you think it means to be an expert in "hard-to-get elicitation"? It means people tell you things. A competitive intelligence consultant discusses things that can help a business--at the expense of another. When I strolled into a Talbots near closing time on a Wednesday night, I wasn't expecting Phipps Plaza in Atlanta's ritzy Buckhead neighborhood to be so dead. Perfect for me. Less so for the store manager. I entered keenly aware of how completely out of place I must have seemed--a heavyset thirtysomething black guy in Walmart dress slacks, trying to look casual while fondling Hillary Clinton-esque blouses. If I were on staff, I might have briefly considered the possibility that I had come in only to knock over the place while things were quiet. And I would have been about right. I'm a competitive-intelligence...
Married Couple Go On Trial in Germany Accused of Spying for Russia for 25 Years A married couple accused of spying on Germany for 25 years for their Russian paymasters went on trial today in a case that could lead directly to Vladimir Putin's door. Andreas and Heidrun Anschlag began their snooping career in the same city, Dresden, where Putin was posted for the KGB. The duo are accused of first feeding information about West Germany to the former Soviet Union, then the reunited land to the Russian Republic. The espionage agents for Moscow operated under the radar of the intelligence services sending back their reports to their handlers via a radio code. 'The accused had the task of gathering information about the political and military strategy of the EU and NATO as well as security-relevant political aspects of relations between Germany, the...
By jdleasure hacking cisco phones
Hacking Cisco Phones Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean your phone isn't listening to everything you say... We discuss a set of 0-day kernel vulnerabilities in CNU (Cisco Native Unix), the operating system that powers all Cisco TNP IP phones. We demonstrate the reliable exploitation of all Cisco TNP phones via multiple vulnerabilities found in the CNU kernel. We demonstrate practical covert surveillance using constant, stealthy exfiltration of microphone data via a number of covert channels. We also demonstrate the worm-like propagation of our CNU malware, which can quickly compromise all vulnerable Cisco phones on the network. We discuss the feasibility of our attacks given physical access, internal network access and remote access across the internet. Lastly, we built on last year's presentation by discussing the feasibility of exploiting Cisco phones from compromised HP printers and vice versa.