One slept with several cabinet ministers. Another sold info to the Soviets to fund his expensive tastes. Take a look back at Canada’s other spies.
The Gouzenko Affair
Igor Gouzenko received intelligence training at the beginning of the Second World War, becoming a cipher clerk at the Soviet legation in Ottawa in 1943. Two years later, after he found out that he and his family were being sent to the USSR, he defected and went public with his knowledge of Soviet-operated spy networks on Canadian soil, armed with documents taken from the embassy to prove his assertions.
No one took Mr. Gouzenko seriously until a Soviet attempt to recapture him. Afterward, 12 suspects were arrested and put before a Royal Commission.
The commissioners, also using Mr. Gouzenko’s testimony and the documents he took, confirmed the existence of a spy ring in July of 1946, adding that the group targeted atomic secrets, among other goals.
Mr. Gouzenko was given a new identity. Even his death, which apparently occurred from natural causes, was kept secret.
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On Jan. 19, 2012, Business Week reported that a Chinese citizen in the U.S. since 2000 on a work visa had pilfered software code from our country’s Federal Reserve and now faces legal action in U.S. vs. Zhang.
Bo Zhang, 32, a computer programmer hired to work on the highly confidential source code last year, claimed he took the code in order to hedge his bets if he fired from the Fed job.
“He asserted that he took it for private use and in order to ensure that it was available to him in the event that he lost his job [with the New York Fed],” according to prosecutors in the case.
Espionage motivates code theft at the Federal Reserve?
In the spy world, infiltrating high levels of other governments and gaining access to key confidential data is job one. In a world in which economic upheavals are an everyday language and knowing your enemies financial structures and money movements is just as crucial.
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Burger van workers and other licensed mobile traders are being offered free counter-terrorism training to help them spot suspects who might be reconnoitring potential targets in the runup to the Olympics and Paralympics.
The on-street presence of people selling food and drink in London – from ice-cream to baguettes, pizzas and hot dogs – means they are well placed to “contribute to effective surveillance”, according to environmental health experts.
The training is being offered by the Metropolitan police and Westminster council and builds on an existing scheme in which business representatives attend courses to get tips on “hostile reconnaissance”, what to do in case of an attack – including the ‘dos and don’ts of bombs’ – and understanding police communications and cordons.
But not all traders will find themselves on the right side of the law. Many will be subject to spot checks to establish that they are operating legally and safely, with those suspected of breaches having their names, dates of birth and nationalities passed to police and the UK Border Agency (UKBA) for investigation of possible criminal links and their immigration status.
Local authority officials are also compiling a register of potentially violent people linked to mobile and temporary food businesses, with inspection staff warned to have police protection when they carry out checks.
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Scammers are posing as Facebook security in chat sessions to try to trick people into providing their credit card information, Kaspersky Lab warned today.
“This Facebook phishing attack is pretty interesting because it does not just try to trick the victim into visiting a phishing Web site. It will reuse the stolen information and login to the compromised account and change both profile picture and name,” writes David Jacoby, a Kaspersky Lab Expert, in a blog post.
“The profile picture will be changed to the Facebook logo and the name will be translated to ‘Facebook Security’,” he wrote.
After an account has been compromised, the scammers will use it to send out an instant message to the victim’s contacts pretending to be Facebook Security, according to Jacoby. The message says “Last Warning: Your Facebook account will be turned off Because someone has reported you. Please do re-confirm your account security by:” and it provides a URL ending in “.vu” for the recipient to visit, he said.
The link redirects to a Web site that is made to look like a Facebook page and it prompts the visitor to provide name, e-mail, password, security question, e-mail account password, country and birth date, the blog post says. After that information is provided another page appears with a heading “Payment Verification” that asks for the first six digits of the person’s credit card. A subsequent page then asks the visitor to verify the information by providing the full credit card number, expieration date and security code as well as billing address, Jacoby wrote.
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After privately reviewing a closely guarded chapter of the FBI’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, a federal judge has confirmed that it cannot be released to the Muslim civil liberties group that sought access.
U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan forbid access to the bulk of the guide in November, agreeing that the chapters redacted by the FBI are exempt under the Freedom of Information Act because they detail specific internal investigatory techniques and procedures that could assist criminals, terrorists and foreign intelligence operatives.
The FBI had invited Muslim Advocates and other groups to review the entire 270-page guide without redactions at the agency’s headquarters in a 2008 effort to get feedback from the civil rights community. Though the groups had the opportunity to take notes on the guide, the FBI required them to return the materials at the end of the two meetings.
Claiming that they were denied a meaningful review, Muslim Advocates and the other groups demanded copies of the guide.
The FBI ultimately released portions of the DIOG to the public, but it withheld “nearly entire sections on a number of topics – including sections that address the infiltration of Muslim community and religious organizations.”
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There have been so many examples of cyber espionage that it is now the norm to just accept that it is rampant. MI5 in the UK, the German Chancellery, Titan Rain, GhostNet, the Pentagon email hack, Google Aurora – all are examples of cyber espionage, most on the part of China. But to date no evidence has been put forth other than claims from the injured parties.
Thanks to reporting from Anthony Freed of InfoSecIsland we have learned over the past few days that a group of Indian hackers that align themselves with Anonymous (the catch all movement for hackers these days) have breached several Indian government servers and uncovered gold. If taken at face value their hacking has revealed
1. The Indian government has source code for Symantec’s AV software, albeit of 2006 vintage.
2. The Indian government is strong arming cell phone manufacturers to provide back doors into their handsets.
3. The Indian government is in possession of confidential internal communications from the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC).
And now in a new development we learn from Freed:
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The Justice Department on Wednesday honored some of its employees behind the complex legal efforts to keep America safe, but the public ceremony raised more questions about what they did than answered them.
Call it the Black-Ops Oscars, where more than 35 people were presented awards in just less than an hour.
“We’re sorry we can’t say more about it,” Assistant Attorney General Lisa Monaco said, as she recognized attorneys Benjamin Huebner and Joshua Raines for work they did on a “highly classified project affecting national security.”
“Given the nature of the work, I won’t be able to more fully and completely describe some of these accomplishments,” said Monaco who heads the Justice Department’s National Security Division, a section created in 2006 to combat terrorism and other national security threats.
The division employs 340 people with an $88 million budget. Because of the nature of the cases, attorneys often have to work with members of the intelligence community to come up with ways to present evidence at a trial without jeopardizing national security. And in many cases, attorneys have to find ways to prosecute a case without any sensitive intelligence information at all.
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American and British politicians and defense and intelligence officials were among the victims of the hack attack on the website of think tank Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor) last Christmas Day.
A report on UK’s The Guardian said the security breach also exposed the data of North Atlantic Treaty Organization advisers.
The report said the private information exposed by the “hacktivists” included those of 221 British military officials and 242 NATO staff; civil servants working at the heart of the UK government including several in the Cabinet Office as well as advisers to the Joint Intelligence Organisation, have also been exposed, the report said.
It noted the Joint Intelligence Organisation acts as the prime minister’s eyes and ears on sensitive information.
The Guardian report said the hackers are believed to be part of the Anonymous hacker group, which hacked into the account information of Stratfor.
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Earlier this morning, reports that a Canadian gentleman passed through U.S. customs using nothing but an image of his passport on his iPad 2 started circling the Internet.
“Great Scott! Nothing but an iPad!” you say. “How tremendously forward-thinking of our government officials!”
But, alas, according to U.S. customs, the story being circulated doesn’t share the whole picture of the incident. You cannot enter the U.S. using a scanned image of your passport on a mobile device.
The original article, reported by the Canadian Press, stated that the man, Martin Reisch, crossed the border from Quebec into the U.S. just north of Vermont using a scanned copy of his passport on his iPad, along with his physical driver’s license. About a half hour from the border, he realized he’d left his passport at home, but figured he’d give it a shot.
After handing the customs official his iPad, “he kind of gave me a stare, like neither impressed nor amused,” Reisch said. After taking the iPad and driver’s license into the border office for about five minutes, the official returned Reisch’s documents and wished him a happy holidays, letting him into the country.
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China-based hackers for months have been targeting federal agencies and contractors through infected emails apparently to spy on the Pentagon’s drone strategy and other intelligence matters, according to Internet security researchers.
The reported espionage employed a tactic known as spear-phishing where infiltrators, operating under the guise of a legitimate sender, email specific victims a virus-laden file or link. In this case, the hackers used email addresses from military and other government organizations, Jaime Blasco, manager of AlienVault Labs, said Tuesday.
Some emails went to employees at U.S. military contractors, he said, but declined to discuss any information related to specific victims.
The lab traced samples of the malicious software to network addresses in China, AlienVault disclosed last month.
Blasco has since discovered from the same spies separate malware that is capable of overriding Pentagon smart card credentials, known as the Common Access Card, to get into protected resources, he said Tuesday. In addition, the intruders have been pursuing other government organizations with information of interest to Chinese intelligence operations — including the General Services Administration, the U.S. government’s buying arm, and the Central Tibetan Administration.
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“Chinese human-intelligence operations primarily rely on collecting a small amount of information from a large number of people”, said Peter Grier, “Spy case patterns the Chinese style of espionage”.
Although China has been suspected as having a long history of espionage in the U.S. in order to gain knowledge and insight about military and industrial secrets, in recent years the belief that the Chinese government is conducting espionage activities in other countries is becoming increasingly widespread.
According to an annual report made in 2009 to the U.S Congress by the China Economic and Security Review Commission, China’s espionage and cyber-attacks against the U.S. government and business organizations are now a major concern.
The commission’s vice chairman Larry Wortzel stated that, “In addition to harming U.S interests, Chinese human and cyber espionage activities provide China with a method for leaping forward in economical, technological, and military development.” (1)
Chinese Espionage Activities
In 2006 the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released an unclassified document on its website titled the “Report to Congress on Chinese Espionage Activities Against the Unites States”.
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A Chinese satellite navigation system began providing services yesterday as the nation seeks to end its “dependence” on the U.S.’s Global Positioning System, or GPS, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
China’s Beidou Navigation Satellite System began providing initial positioning, navigation and timing operational services for the nation and surrounding areas, Xinhua reported yesterday, citing Ran Chengqi, director of the management office of the China Satellite Navigation System. Work began on the Beidou system in 2000 with a goal of creating a global position service by 2020, according to Xinhua.
The U.S.-owned GPS system is the world’s primary source of satellite navigation data that provides directions for drivers, tracking systems for emergency rescue teams and also positioning services for U.S. military vehicles and munitions. The U.S. Air Force operates the more than 30 satellites on which the system is based.
China has already launched 10 satellites for the Beidou system, the most recent of which entered orbit earlier this month, Xinhua reported. Six more satellites will be launched in 2012 to further improve the system and expand its coverage to most of the Asia-Pacific region, Xinhua quoted Ran as saying. The system is compatible with the world’s other major global navigation satellite systems, according to the report.
Civilian service provided by the U.S.’s GPS system is freely available to all users on a continuous, worldwide basis, according to the service’s website. The service is made up of space, control and user segments, of which the U.S. Air Force develops, maintains, and operates the space and control segments.
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