The Strava fitness-tracking app is being used to spy upon members of the Israeli military, tracking their movements at secret bases across the country and potentially even help observe their activities when they travel overseas.
Read more in my article on the Hot for Security blog.
Category: surveillance
How did a saxophonist sneak sensitive information in and out of the Soviet Union? How might an Apple AirTag have led to murder? And isn't the world of cryptocurrency and blockchain doing just great?
All this and more is discussed in the latest edition of the award-winning "Smashing Security" podcast by computer security veterans Graham Cluley and Carole Theriault.
O! What a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive.
Twitter was fined $150 million for using phone numbers and email addresses collected for two-factor authentication for ad targeting.
Britain’s government received a red alert last week to the Chinese government monitoring the country’s populace through its AI Satellites and thousands of CCTV Cameras.
Fraser Sampson, the Commissioner for Bio-metrics and Surveillance Cameras, wrote a detailed report to Micheal Grave, the Cabinet Minister, over the dominance of Chinese companies in the supply and deployment of surveillance equipment in Britain.
Mr. Samson is extremely concerned about the dominance of two companies Dahua and Hikvision that have grabbed about 60% of the market share in Britain’s CCTV Market.
As both companies are being controlled by the Chinese Communist Party(CCP), Mr. Fraser is of the opinion that both these firms have the potential to turn the tables anytime.
What’s concerning is that most of the cameras manufactured at these companies are installed at schools, NHS Trusts, army headquarters, and Universities. And a third of them are having backdoors that can be exploited to access images and data without the permission of the owner.
Estimates conducted by the UK-based privacy group Big Brother Watch suggest that Britain has about 164,000 Hikvision cameras installed in public places, while Dahua has its presence felt with over 14,000 cameras installed on-premises of various government bodies.
If this isn’t enough, China is also reportedly using CCTV cameras set up for precision-based missile strikes. This is done by mapping the location of CCTV cameras with satellites and then using the technology of Artificial Intelligence to launch missile attacks based on the guidance given by satellites and CCTV camera coordinates.
IPVM which maintains a huge repository of CCTV camera information says that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has developed weapons that operate by integrating surveillance technology and can destroy targets when mapped through surface-to-air systems and surface-to-surface systems using both moving and fixed launchers.
Hope, someone from the white house has noted these developments!
The post China monitors UK and US populace through AI Satellites and thousands of CCTV Cameras appeared first on Cybersecurity Insiders.
San Francisco police are using autonomous vehicles as mobile surveillance cameras.
Privacy advocates say the revelation that police are actively using AV footage is cause for alarm.
“This is very concerning,” Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) senior staff attorney Adam Schwartz told Motherboard. He said cars in general are troves of personal consumer data, but autonomous vehicles will have even more of that data from capturing the details of the world around them. “So when we see any police department identify AVs as a new source of evidence, that’s very concerning.”
Georgetown has a new report on the highly secretive bulk surveillance activities of ICE in the US:
When you think about government surveillance in the United States, you likely think of the National Security Agency or the FBI. You might even think of a powerful police agency, such as the New York Police Department. But unless you or someone you love has been targeted for deportation, you probably don’t immediately think of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
This report argues that you should. Our two-year investigation, including hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests and a comprehensive review of ICE’s contracting and procurement records, reveals that ICE now operates as a domestic surveillance agency. Since its founding in 2003, ICE has not only been building its own capacity to use surveillance to carry out deportations but has also played a key role in the federal government’s larger push to amass as much information as possible about all of our lives. By reaching into the digital records of state and local governments and buying databases with billions of data points from private companies, ICE has created a surveillance infrastructure that enables it to pull detailed dossiers on nearly anyone, seemingly at any time. In its efforts to arrest and deport, ICE has — without any judicial, legislative or public oversight — reached into datasets containing personal information about the vast majority of people living in the U.S., whose records can end up in the hands of immigration enforcement simply because they apply for driver’s licenses; drive on the roads; or sign up with their local utilities to get access to heat, water and electricity.
ICE has built its dragnet surveillance system by crossing legal and ethical lines, leveraging the trust that people place in state agencies and essential service providers, and exploiting the vulnerability of people who volunteer their information to reunite with their families. Despite the incredible scope and evident civil rights implications of ICE’s surveillance practices, the agency has managed to shroud those practices in near-total secrecy, evading enforcement of even the handful of laws and policies that could be invoked to impose limitations. Federal and state lawmakers, for the most part, have yet to confront this reality.
EDITED TO ADD (5/13): A news article.
FinFisher has shut down operations. This is the spyware company whose products were used, among other things, to spy on Turkish and Bahraini political opposition.
The malicious uses of these technologies are scary:
Police reportedly arrived on the scene last week and found the man crouched beside the woman’s passenger side door. According to the police, the man had, at some point, wrapped his Apple Watch across the spokes of the woman’s passenger side front car wheel and then used the Watch to track her movements. When police eventually confronted him, he admitted the Watch was his. Now, he’s reportedly being charged with attaching an electronic tracking device to the woman’s vehicle.