Entries Tagged "theft"
Page 15 of 22
The Case of the Stolen BlackBerry and the Awesome Chinese Hacking Skills
A high-level British government employee had his BlackBerry stolen by Chinese intelligence:
The aide, a senior Downing Street adviser who was with the prime minister on a trip to China earlier this year, had his BlackBerry phone stolen after being picked up by a Chinese woman who had approached him in a Shanghai hotel disco.
The aide agreed to return to his hotel with the woman. He reported the BlackBerry missing the next morning.
That can’t look good on your annual employee review.
But it’s this part of the article that has me confused:
Experts say that even if the aide’s device did not contain anything top secret, it might enable a hostile intelligence service to hack into the Downing Street server, potentially gaining access to No 10’s e-mail traffic and text messages.
Um, what? I assume the IT department just turned off the guy’s password. Was this nonsense peddled to the press by the UK government, or is some “expert” trying to sell us something? The article doesn’t say.
EDITED TO ADD (7/22): The first commenter makes a good point, which I didn’t think of. The article says that it’s Chinese intelligence:
A senior official said yesterday that the incident had all the hallmarks of a suspected honeytrap by Chinese intelligence.
But Chinese intelligence would be far more likely to clone the BlackBerry and then return it. Much better information that way. This is much more likely to be petty theft.
EDITED TO ADD (7/23): The more I think about this story, the less sense it makes. If you’re a Chinese intelligence officer and you manage to get an aide to the British Prime Minister to have sex with one of your agents, you’re not going to immediately burn him by stealing his BlackBerry. That’s just stupid.
Exploiting the War on Photography
Petty thieves are exploiting the war on photography in Genoa:
As they were walking around, Jeff saw some interesting looking produce and pulled out his Canon G-9 Point-and-Shoot and took a few pictures. Within a few minutes a man came up dressed in plain clothes, flashed a badge, and told him he couldn’t take photos in the store. My brother said “no problem” (after all, it’s a private store, right?), but then the guy demanded my brother’s memory card.
My brother gave him that “Are you outta your mind” look and said, “No way!” Can you guess what happened next? The guy simply shrugged his shoulders and walked away.
My brother saw him in the store a little later, and the guy had a bag and was shopping. My brother made eye contact with him, and the guy turned away as though he didn’t want Jeff looking at him. Jeff feels like this wasn’t “official store security,” but instead some guy collecting (and then reselling) memory cards from unsuspecting tourists (many of whom might have just surrendered that card immediately).
Hundreds of Thousands of Laptops Lost at U.S. Airports Annually
This is a weird statistic:
Some of the largest and medium-sized U.S. airports report close to 637,000 laptops lost each year, according to the Ponemon Institute survey released Monday. Laptops are most commonly lost at security checkpoints, according to the survey.
Close to 10,278 laptops are reported lost every week at 36 of the largest U.S. airports, and 65 percent of those laptops are not reclaimed, the survey said. Around 2,000 laptops are recorded lost at the medium-sized airports, and 69 percent are not reclaimed.
Travelers seem to lack confidence that they will recover lost laptops. About 77 percent of people surveyed said they had no hope of recovering a lost laptop at the airport, with 16 percent saying they wouldn’t do anything if they lost their laptop during business travel. About 53 percent said that laptops contain confidential company information, with 65 percent taking no steps to protect the information.
I don’t know how to generalize that to a total number of lost laptops in the U.S.; let’s call it 750,000. At $1,000 per laptop—a very conservative estimate—that’s $750 million in lost laptops annually. Most are lost at security checkpoints, and I’m sure the numbers went up considerably since those checkpoints got more annoying after 9/11.
There aren’t a lot of real numbers about the costs of increased airport security. We pay in time, in anxiety, in inconvenience. But we also pay in goods. TSA employees steal out of suitcases. And opportunists steal hundreds of millions of dollars of laptops annually.
EDITED TO ADD (7/14): Seems like this is not a story.
Security Through Obscurity
Sometimes security through obscurity works:
Yes, the New York Police Department provided an escort, but during more than eight hours on Saturday, one of the great hoards of coins and currency on the planet, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, was utterly unalarmed as it was bumped through potholes, squeezed by double-parked cars and slowed by tunnel-bound traffic during the trip to its fortresslike new vault a mile to the north.
In the end, the move did not become a caper movie.
“The idea was to make this as inconspicuous as possible,” said Ute Wartenberg Kagan, executive director of the American Numismatic Society. “It had to resemble a totally ordinary office move.”
[…]
Society staff members were pledged to secrecy about the timing of the move, and “we didn’t tell our movers what the cargo was until the morning of,” said James McVeigh, operations manager of Time Moving and Storage Inc. of Manhattan, referring to the crew of 20 workers.
From my book Beyond Fear, pp. 211-12:
At 3,106 carats, a little under a pound and a half, the Cullinan Diamond was the largest uncut diamond ever discovered. It was extracted from the earth at the Premier Mine, near Pretoria, South Africa, in 1905. Appreciating the literal enormity of the find, the Transvaal government bought the diamond as a gift for King Edward VII. Transporting the stone to England was a huge security problem, of course, and there was much debate on how best to do it. Detectives were sent from London to guard it on its journey. News leaked that a certain steamer was carrying it, and the presence of the detectives confirmed this. But the diamond on that steamer was a fake. Only a few people knew of the real plan; they packed the Cullinan in a small box, stuck a three-shilling stamp on it, and sent it to England anonymously by unregistered parcel post.
This is a favorite story of mine. Not only can we analyze the complex security system intended to transport the diamond from continent to continent—the huge number of trusted people involved, making secrecy impossible; the involved series of steps with their associated seams, giving almost any organized gang numerous opportunities to pull off a theft—but we can contrast it with the sheer beautiful simplicity of the actual transportation plan. Whoever came up with it was really thinking—and thinking originally, boldly, and audaciously.
This kind of counterintuitive security is common in the world of gemstones. On 47th Street in New York, in Antwerp, in London: People walk around all the time with millions of dollars’ worth of gems in their pockets. The gemstone industry has formal guidelines: If the value of the package is under a specific amount, use the U.S. Mail. If it is over that amount but under another amount, use Federal Express. The Cullinan was again transported incognito; the British Royal Navy escorted an empty box across the North Sea to Amsterdam—where the diamond would be cut—while famed diamond cutter Abraham Asscher actually carried it in his pocket from London via train and night ferry to Amsterdam.
FakeTV
Interesting burglar prevention device: it simulates a television. But why not just leave a real television on?
Clever Museum Theft
Some expensive and impressive stuff was stolen from the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology:
A dozen pieces of gold jewelry designed by prominent Canadian artist Bill Reid were stolen from the museum sometime on May 23, along with three pieces of gold-plated Mexican jewelry. The pieces that were taken are estimated to be worth close to $2 million.
Of course, it’s not the museum’s fault:
But museum director Anthony Shelton said that elaborate computer program printouts have determined that the museum’s security system did not fail during the heist and that the construction of the building’s layout did not compromise security.
Um, isn’t having stuff get stolen the very definition of security failing? And does anyone have any idea how “elaborate computer program printouts” can determine that security didn’t fail? What in the world is this guy talking about?
A few days later, we learned that security did indeed fail:
Four hours before the break-in on May 23, two or three key surveillance cameras at the Museum of Anthropology mysteriously went off-line.
Around the same time, a caller claiming to be from the alarm company phoned campus security, telling them there was a problem with the system and to ignore any alarms that might go off.
Campus security fell for the ruse and ignored an automated computer alert sent to them, police sources told CBC News.
Meanwhile surveillance cameras that were still operating captured poor pictures of what was going on inside the museum because of a policy to turn the lights off at night.
Then, as the lone guard working overnight in the museum that night left for a smoke break, the thief or thieves broke in, wearing gas masks and spraying bear spray to slow down anyone who might stumble across them.
It’s a particular kind of security failure, but it’s definitely a failure.
London's Cameras Don't Reduce Crime
Massive investment in CCTV cameras to prevent crime in the UK has failed to have a significant impact, despite billions of pounds spent on the new technology, a senior police officer piloting a new database has warned. Only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe.
[…]
Use of CCTV images for court evidence has so far been very poor, according to Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville, the officer in charge of the Metropolitan police unit. “CCTV was originally seen as a preventative measure,” Neville told the Security Document World Conference in London. “Billions of pounds has been spent on kit, but no thought has gone into how the police are going to use the images and how they will be used in court. It’s been an utter fiasco: only 3% of crimes were solved by CCTV. There’s no fear of CCTV. Why don’t people fear it? [They think] the cameras are not working.”
This is, of course is absolutely no surprise.
Hypnotist Thief in Italy
Okay, this is weird:
Police in Italy have issued footage of a man who is suspected of hypnotising supermarket checkout staff to hand over money from their cash registers.
In every case, the last thing staff reportedly remember is the thief leaning over and saying: “Look into my eyes”, before finding the till empty.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.