Is Someone Watching You through Your Webcam?

I was reading a really informative article on how phone and in-person conversations can be recorded legally. While wiretapping has been the main privacy concern in the past decades, the advent of new technology has also brought new privacy concerns. One of the more alarming privacy concerns I have seen lately is webcam spying.

Apparently, people can already hack into a webcam without triggering the record light on. These hackers use RATs to activate webcams, often targeting women for their less-than-scrupulous actions. No, they do not use the rodent kind of RATs.

The acronym stands for Remote Access Trojans. These malwares (malicious software) gain access into a person’s computer through compromised files, processes, services, clipboards, active network connections (including the Internet), and registries. Some privacy advocates suggest the use of tape to block web camera lens while it is not in use.

This diminishes a computer’s or laptop’s aesthetics but this does help in maintaining privacy. This is a native solution that can be taken while more reliable, sophisticated software are not yet within the public’s reach. But RATs do not only target webcams. They can also do a whole host of things that you would not want anybody to be doing with your very own computer.

They can remotely control a computer, take screenshots, record keystrokes, steal passwords, download more anomalous files, and open web pages. Just for their own sadistic fun, they can also cause a computer system to fail or send taunting audio message if the computer is text-to-audio capable. Gaining access to a computer will also allow hackers to steal personal data from their targets.

Cybercriminals can use stolen data to commit identity theft. In 2013, anti-virus company Kaspersky had tracked 3 billion malware attacks. That number only tells you that you have to take proactive actions to protect your computer.

Here are some ways you can prevent RATs and other viruses from infecting your computer.

• Do not download executable files unless they are from trusted sources. Only install programs from known sources.

• Do not open suspicious emails. They may carry executable files that carry viruses.

• Do not plug USBs, music players, and other external hardware into your computer unless they are from a reliable user.

• Do not visit suspicious sites. If a website does not look legitimate, it probably isn’t.

• Back up your data regularly. Should you need to reformat your infected computer, you can easily recover those data and programs that you will lose.

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Why Shoplifters Shoplift

This is a straightforward question that merits a straightforward answer: shoplifters steal because they want to get something without paying for it. The motives could be economic. That is the simplest explanation that does not require further discussion.

But the motives behind shoplifting are not always as simple as that. There are many reasons that causes a person to shoplift.

Feeling of being in control

Some people shoplift because it gives them a feeling of control. A person who is deprived economically may feel being deprived of the ability to get what they want. A shoplifter compensates for this feeling of futility by getting an item without paying for it.

By bypassing the regular process of shopping and paying for merchandise, they are able to get what they want even if they do not have the legal means to do so. Hence, the feeling of being in control is attained through acquisition.

Justified payback

Some people feel that they are simply getting what they deserve when they shoplift. They feel that they have been sold over-priced goods and merchandise that is why it is only “fair” for them to take some of their money back.

Emotional relief

For some people, shoplifting creates a feeling of thrill and adrenaline rush. This rush lifts their moves, eliminates the boredom in their lives, and creates an overall feeling of emotional relief. About a third of people who have been caught shoplifting were diagnosed with some form of depression.

   

This same emotional relief is the reason why many shoplifters are not able to stop doing what they do even if they have already been caught.

Are these shoplifters bad people? Not necessarily. Most of these people will not steal a bike left on the side of the road, will return your wallet if you left it on the table, and might even contact you if they found your phone. They simply shoplift because of the misconceived idea that it is doing them good.

Shoplifting is a problem shared by the entire community. It deprives honest shop owners of the chance to earn honest money, burdens the police with more arrest that have to be done, and floods the court with many more cases that have to be heard. It costs the community tax dollars just to be able to fight the crime.

If you are a business owner, you can do your part in fighting this crime. I came across an amazing article on how to stop shoplifting which offers amazing tips on how you can do your part to help the community.

By doing your part, you can protect your business and even help others. The magnitude of what you do may not be immediately apparent, but it goes a long way in protecting your business and making the community a better place.

image credit: mysecuritysign.com

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Looking on the Bright Side: The Six Sexiest Female Hackers

Seriously, in the early ‘60s, to be a hacker is an honor.

At MIT, the Tech Model Railroad Club’s hackers were the nucleus of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the world's leading center of AI research into the early 1980s.

Even today at MIT, the word “hacker” is used only in its original meaning—someone who applies ingenuity to create a clever result, called a “hack.”

This original benevolent meaning stands in stark contrast to the later and more commonly used meaning of a “hacker,” typically a person who breaks into computer networks in order to steal or vandalize.

These password crackers are pretty pesky nowadays. Sadly, they are expected to get peskier this year, and in the years to come, directing international efforts toward of strengthening online security.  

One of those unfortunate turn of a word’s fate, you might say. 

But hey, to cheer everyone at TMRC up, we have listed down the 5 bright sides—so bright they could make our day—there is to the phenomenon called hacking. No matter how mundane they are [insert naughty-boy smile here].

Adeanna Cooke

 Source: www.atcoitec.com

Adeanna is not just your typical Playboy model. Yes, you got it right. A former Playmate is on top of this list!

Sure she has taken some naked pictures, but she kept dignity intact. After an ill-meaning friend decided to send her hot photos online to make money from them without her consent, she took the matter into her own hands. 

If you think she went to authorities and pled her sad plight, you’re bound to be wrong. No, she was not a cry-baby. But just what did she do?

Well, she hacked the website displaying her face (and body!) and took down everything that has to be taken down. Badass.

After her much-celebrated success, Adeanna has been helping out women who have had the misfortune of being exploited unwillingly in the Internet.

 Ying Cracker

Source: www.sankartech.wordpress.com

The teaching profession is the last thing on earth that you would associate with hacking. And yet, there she is, a reminder that such extreme realities could coexist.

Guys, meet Ying, one of the most beautiful educators from Shanghai. She teaches the basics of hacking—from changing IP address to wiping Office passwords. Seriously, guys, who doesn’t want to learn how to hack from a teacher as hot as this?

Although her last name is anything but saying altogether what is obvious, she has one of the more resonating names in the hacking business.

How did she climb the popularity ladder? Well, it was in an online forum “Chinese Hottie Hackers” posting that got Cracker noticed by gawkers on the internet and created a huge fan base for her.

Her work is pretty impressive as well. She’s an expert in hacker software writing and charges good money for courses on simple hacking tools. She charges between RMB 500–5000 in helping other people crack software and usually makes about RMB 15,000 per month.

That is, of course, cracking the unwritten history of her last name.

Kim Vanvaeck a.k.a. Gigabyte

Source: http://www.vanvaeck.net/

This Russian beauty is believed to have been the primary creator of a number of high-end viruses that sought to target hardware with sensitive information.

Unlike many other viruses that were meant to steal private information in order to make money, these viruses were used to destroy the information itself.

Vanvaeck began tweaking viruses at 14 but maintained she never actually released any of her creations on the Web. Law enforcement agencies have tried to paint her as a woman that is seeking notoriety in a field that is dominated by men, and Gigabyte’s name was traced to hundreds of viruses throughout the years.

She lives mostly in Belgium, Brussels and has completed her degree for Master of Industrial Sciences (Industrial Engineer). Now she works as an IT advisor.

Kristina Svechinskaya

Source: www.2.bp.blogspot.com

Kristina is a Russian money mule hacker. A money mule is a person who transfers money acquired illegally in person, through a courier service, or electronically, on behalf of others.

A New York University student, she was accused of a plot to defraud several British and U.S. banks of sizeable sums and usage of false passports.

According to charges, Kristina used Zeus Trojan horse to attack thousands of bank accounts and opened at least five accounts in Bank of America and Wachovia, which received $35,000 (£22,000) of money theft.

It is estimated that with nine other people, she had skimmed $3 million in total. However, she has since enjoyed liberty as the US court that handled her case has forgiven her.

Xiao Tian

 

Source: www.3.bp.blogspot.com

Seemingly upset that China’s massive population is male-dominated, a Chinese hottie founded a group of hackers exclusive for the hot female species.  

She was only 19 when she made the bold innovation, but Xiao Tian was and is the unquestioned leader of the exclusive group that calls itself China Girl Security Team. Now it boasts a huge membership that reached over 2 thousand which is by the way China’s largest group of hackers today.

According to Xiao Tian, she created the now-infamous hacking team because she felt that there was no other outlet for teenage girls like herself in the male-dominated world of hacking.

Little by little, the group has broken male dominance in the hacking business. The group has been targeting celebrities and has opened “career opportunities” to its qualified members.

 Joanna Rutkowska

 

Source: www.chaordicmind.com

An “ethical hacker.”

Is there such a thing today? And yet that’s how you would describe Joanna.

A Polish computer security researcher, she is primarily known for her research on low-level security and stealth malware. She specializes in developing software and tools to counter hackers in the webiverse.

She’s, of course, an elite hacker herself and has launched her own security services startup. She has even teamed up with Microsoft, advising vice president of Microsoft's Security Technology Unit on tightening the security on Windows Vista.

In 2006, she presented an attack against Vista Kernel protection mechanism in Las Vegas at the Black Hat Briefings conference. In the same conference, she also presented a technique dubbed as Blue Pill that used hardware virtualization to move a running OS into a virtual machine.

For her research on the topic, she was been named one of “Five Hackers who put a Mark on 2006” by eWeek Magazine.

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Always a Tight Race: Ten Equally Famous and Infamous Cases of Corporate Espionage

Just recently, the NSA created a buzz around the world over the leakage of confidential documents that cited the agency’s spying activities virtually on every American worldwide.

Of course, this solicited a public uproar from Americans that have been perpetually pampered by the trappings of democracy.

When it comes to business, however, espionage is something that has been around for as long as collective memory can remember. In fact, one can make a claim that since the earliest days of commerce, there had been espionage.

The methods and gadgets used for spying on competitors have changed over time, but the desire to uncover a rival’s secrets has not.

Below is the list of equally famous and infamous cases of recorded corporate espionage through the years.

1. Vintage Copycat

Francois Xavier d’Entrecolles was a French Jesuit priest who discovered the Chinese technique of manufacturing porcelain through his investigations in China in the early 1700s.

Source: www.chinese-porcelain-art.com

D’Entrecolles used direct observation at the kilns, as well as directly consulted Chinese technical sources.

Soon, he became a leading maker of high-quality porcelain, and by then, began sending letters to Europe, describing the nitty-gritty of the Oriental craft to Western audience.

2. For all the tea in China!

In the 1800s, China had monopoly of the tea industry, something the British just couldn’t stomach. So the London-based East India Company hired Robert Fortune, a Scottish botanist and adventurer, to smuggle tea plants, seeds, and secrets out of China and into British-ruled India.

Source: www.smithsonianmag.com

Similar to other European travelers of the period, Fortune disguised as a Chinese merchant in his journeys beyond the newly established treaty port areas.

Not only was Fortune's purchase of tea plants forbidden by the Chinese government, but his travels were also beyond the allowable day’s journey from the European treaty ports.

He is most remembered for using Wardian cases to sustain seedlings. Using these small greenhouses, Fortune introduced 20,000 tea plants and seedlings to the Darjeeling region of India. 

Source: www.examiner.com

He also brought with him a group of trained Chinese tea workers who would facilitate the production of tea leaves. It was called by the writer Sarah Rose as the “greatest single act of corporate espionage in history.”

And fittingly so. For within his lifetime, India surpassed China as the leader in tea production worldwide.

3. Driving Home the Competition

It’s bad enough for a company when a top executive leaves to join a competitor.

So it was a multiple whammy for General Motor’s Opel when production chief Jose Ignacio Lopez and seven other executives left to join the rival German automaker Volkswagen in 1993.

Source: article.wn.com

    

Shortly thereafter, Opel accused Volkswagen of industrial espionage over an alleged missing bundle of confidential documents. In response, VW countered with accusations of defamation.

In the end, the companies agreed to one of the largest settlements of its kind: Opel would drop its lawsuits in exchange for VW’s pledge to buy $1 billion of GM parts over seven years. In addition, VW would pay Opel $100 million.

Source: www.autoshoz.com

Volkswagen still refused to apologize, though, showing that even multinational car companies can be as stubborn as 5-year-old children.

4. Razor Sharp

In 1997, out of anger at his supervisor, Steven Louis Davis faxed and e-mailed drawings of Gillette’s new razor design to competitors.  

Source: www.logoeps.net

Davis was an engineer at Wright Industries Inc., a designer of fabrication equipment that was hired by Gillette to help develop its next generation shaver.

Davis immediately pled guilty to theft of trade secrets and wire fraud, was sentenced to 27 months in prison, and was ordered to pay $1.3 million in restitution.

5. Trash Talking

Source: marketplayground.com

In 2000, out of “civic duty,” Larry Ellison of Oracle Corporation hired a detective agency to investigate on the groups that supported Microsoft. Oracle employed Investigative Group International to look into actions by two research organizations, the Independent Institute and the National Taxpayers Union, that were releasing studies supportive of Microsoft.

Ellison said Oracle sought evidence that the groups were receiving financial support from Microsoft during its antitrust trial.  

Source: mobilenewsdaily.net

The case was brought to the open when media ran stories about the hired investigative group trying to buy trash from cleaning women at the Association for Competitive Technology, a research group that Microsoft backed.

6. More Trash Talking

Source: www.rx-360.org

In 2001, Procter & Gamble was caught sticking its nose on the wrong window. P&G admitted to a spying operation, allegedly carried out over 6 months, on its hair-care competitor, Unilever.

Their cunning plan included the ridiculously going through Unilever’s trash in search of documents. However, P&G denied Fortune Magazine’s allegation that their operatives pretended to be market analysts.

Source: www.thenewstribe.com

The two companies reached an agreement, and P&G has pledged not to use any of the information it gained in product development. Dumpster pizza and shredded paper certainly don’t sound like the next big thing in hair care.

7. Operation Shady RAT

Source: gigaom.com

In what was described as one of the largest cyberattacks, spies hacked more than 70 companies, governments, and nonprofit organizations beginning in 2006.

Security company McAfee didn’t name the perpetrator in its report, but suggests that the targeting of various athletic oversight organizations around the time of the 2008 Summer Olympics “potentially pointed a finger at a state actor behind the intrusions.”

Dell SecureWorks traced the same attacks and pointed the source to China. Hackers took information from some of the victims over a period as long as two years.

Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Operation Shady RAT got its named from a derivation of the common computer security industry acronym for Remote Access Tool.

8. HP’s Take on Big Brother

In 2006, Hewlett-Packard’s general counsel, at the command of HP chair Patricia Dunn, contracted a team of independent security experts to investigate board members and several journalists in order to identify the source of an information leak.

Source: www.bizcominthenews.com

In turn, those security experts recruited private investigators who used a spying technique known as pretexting, which involved investigators impersonating HP board members and nine journalists (including reporters for CNET, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal) in order to obtain their phone records. They also trawled through garbage and followed reporters.

As a result, Dunn was fired. HP also agreed to pay $14.5 million to settle an investigation by California’s attorney general, $6.3 million to settle shareholder lawsuits, and an undisclosed amount to settle a case filed by journalists at the New York Times and Business Week.

9. Drilling Operations

In 2009, Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell and BP were among the oil companies targeted by hackers working through internet servers in China, stealing proprietary information from the energy companies.

Source: www.carteretcrossroads.org

IT security firm McAfee reported on 10 February that the attacks had resulted in the loss of project-financing information relating to oil and gas field bids and operations.

The attacks, dubbed as Night Dragon, targeted computerized topographical maps worth “millions of dollars” that locate potential oil reserves.

In some of the cases, hackers had undetected access to company networks for more than a year.

10. Complaint Lodged

Source: swissalpinecenter.blogspot.com

In 2009 Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide lodged a complaint against Hilton Hotels for corporate espionage. This happened after Hilton employed 10 executives and managers from Starwood who downloaded “truckloads” of documents before leaving for the bigger group.

The said executives were involved in developing Starwood’s “lifestyle and luxury” hotels, including the St. Regis, W, and Luxury Collection brands.

Starwood’s accusations were centered around luxury brand ideas, with the former head of Starwood’s luxury brands group alleged to have downloaded “truckloads” of documents before leaving for the bigger firm.

Source: thatlooksugly.com

Starwood had claimed that the executives hired by Hilton stole information about Starwood’s W hotel brand to develop the Denizen line of properties.

In 2010, the two groups reached a settlement that required the Hilton group to make payments to Starwood, as well as refrain from developing a competing luxury hotel brand until 2013.

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