NSA Spying Scandal: Waiting For the Next Shoe to Drop FORTUNE -- Thursday night, after the Guardian broke news of Verizon's involvement in a massive domestic spying operation by the National Security Agency, the Washington Post and the Guardian both revealed the existence of a program called PRISM -- a means by which the government gained access to the servers of big technology companies. How big? Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo, Google, AOL, and PalTalk (a chat service popular in the Arab world) were all listed, and Dropbox, a popular cloud-storage service, was noted to be coming on board the PRISM program "soon." The companies have all, in turn, professed shock, confusion, and denial at the implication that they knowingly aided the NSA in its efforts to collect an astonishing array of our data, from emails, audio, video, photos, documents attached to emails, and even the connection logs that leave a trail of breadcrumbs...
By jdleasure cyber espionage
Sudden Death of U.S. Engineer in Singapore Linked to Cyber Espionage? For years, the U.S. intelligence community has warned that cyber attacks from China and other countries are the biggest threat to our national security. Now, some are wondering whether the death of an engineer from California could be linked to cyber espionage. In 2010, 29-year-old Shane Todd moved to Singapore for an engineering job with a government research firm called the Institute of Micro Electronics or IME. "He was a young man that wanted an adventure and thought it would be super-cool to live in a foreign country and he really liked it when he first got there," Mary Todd, his mother, recalled. But 18 months later in June of 2012, Shane Todd was found dead inside his apartment. Police and the coroner believe Todd hanged himself in the bathroom, leaving two suicide...
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...
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...
