Tag Archive for: surveillance

Google Just Denied Cops a Key Surveillance Tool

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A hacker group calling itself Solntsepek, previously linked to the infamous Russian military hacking unit Sandworm, took credit this week for a disruptive attack on the Ukrainian internet and mobile service provider Kyivstar. As Russia’s kinetic war against Ukraine has dragged on, inflicting what the World Bank estimates to be around $410 billion in recovery costs for Ukraine, the country has launched an official crowdfunding platform known as United24 as a means of raising awareness and rebuilding.

Kytch, the small company that aimed to fix McDonald’s notably often-broken ice cream machines, claims it has discovered a “smoking gun” email from the CEO of McDonald’s ice cream machine manufacturer that Kytch’s lawyers say suggests an alleged plan to undermine Kytch as a potential competitor. Kytch argues in a recent court filing that the email reveals the real reason why, a couple of weeks later, McDonald’s sent an email to thousands of its restaurant franchisees claiming safety hazards related to Kytch’s ice-cream-machine-whispering device.

WIRED looked at how Microsoft’s Digital Crime Unit has refined a strategy over the past decade that combines intelligence and technical capabilities from Microsoft’s massive infrastructure with creative legal tactics to disrupt both global cybercrime and state-backed actors. And we dove into the controversy over reauthorization of Section 702 surveillance powers in the US Congress.

And there’s more. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t break or cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories, and stay safe out there.

Geofence warrants, which require tech companies to cough up data on everyone in a certain geographic area at a certain time, have become an incredibly powerful tool for law enforcement. Sending a geofence warrant to Google, in particular, has come to be seen as almost an “easy button” among police investigators, given that Google has long stored location data on users in the cloud, where it can be demanded to help police identify suspects based on the timing and location of a crime alone—a practice that has appalled privacy advocates and other critics who say it…

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Russia Seeds New Surveillance Tech to Squash Ukraine War Dissent

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As the war in Ukraine unfolded last year, Russia’s best digital spies turned to new tools to fight an enemy on another front: those inside its own borders who opposed the war.

To aid an internal crackdown, Russian authorities had amassed an arsenal of technologies to track the online lives of citizens. After it invaded Ukraine, its demand grew for more surveillance tools. That helped stoke a cottage industry of tech contractors, which built products that have become a powerful — and novel — means of digital surveillance.

The technologies have given the police and Russia’s Federal Security Service, better known as the F.S.B., access to a buffet of snooping capabilities focused on the day-to-day use of phones and websites. The tools offer ways to track certain kinds of activity on encrypted apps like WhatsApp and Signal, monitor the locations of phones, identify anonymous social media users and break into people’s accounts, according to documents from Russian surveillance providers obtained by The New York Times, as well as security experts, digital activists and a person involved with the country’s digital surveillance operations.

President Vladimir V. Putin is leaning more on technology to wield political power as Russia faces military setbacks in Ukraine, bruising economic sanctions and leadership challenges after an uprising led by Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the commander of the Wagner paramilitary group. In doing so, Russia — which once lagged authoritarian regimes like China and Iran in using modern technology to exert control — is quickly catching up.

“It’s made people very paranoid, because if you communicate with anyone in Russia, you can’t be sure whether it’s secure or not. They are monitoring traffic very actively,” said Alena Popova, a Russian opposition political figure and digital rights activist. “It used to be only for activists. Now they have expanded it to anyone who disagrees with the war.”

The effort has fed the coffers of a constellation of relatively unknown Russian technology firms. Many are owned by Citadel Group, a business once partially controlled by Alisher Usmanov, who was a target of European Union sanctions as one of Mr. Putin’s…

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The tech flaw that lets hackers control surveillance cameras

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Last year, the privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch attempted to find out. Between August 2021 and January 2022, it submitted 4,510 Freedom of Information requests to public bodies across the UK. Of 1,289 that responded, 806 confirmed they used Hikvision or Dahua cameras – 227 councils and 15 police forces use Hikvision, and 35 councils use Dahua.

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Army taps Lockheed for second phase of long-range EW, surveillance program

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Land Warfare, Networks / Cyber

Silhouette Electronic Warfare

U.S. Army Soldiers assigned to “Wild Bill” Platoon, 1st Squadron, 7th Cavalry Regiment and 1st Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment conduct electronic warfare training during Combined Resolve XV, Feb. 23, 2021 at the Hohenfels Training Area. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Julian Padua)

WASHINGTON — Lockheed Martin will move onto the second phase of building out a prototype meant to provide formations larger than the brigade level with longer-range electronic warfare (EW) systems and situational awareness capabilities, beating out competitor General Dynamics Missions Systems (GDMS.) 

Under the contract, announced Tuesday by the Army, Lockheed will take its Terrestrial Layer System-Echelons Above Brigade (TLS-EAB) prototype from “design and lab-based demonstrations to a tangible form factor able to be tested in a relevant environment,” Lt. Col. Kris Haley, product manager for terrestrial spectrum warfare said. The award is worth up to $36.7 million for a 21-month period of performance. 

“The TLS-EAB is an extended-range, terrestrial sensing, collection, and electronic attack system providing integrated [signals intelligence], EW and cyber capabilities for situational awareness, situational understanding, Intelligence & Warning, command post survivability, critical asset protection operations, and supports the delivery of lethal and non-lethal effects in a holistic, synchronized manner for Multi-Domain Operations (MDO),” according to the announcement. Translation: It’s meant to better let commanders know the various threats they’re facing at a greater distance.

Lockheed will build the prototype TLS-EAB system at its facility in Syracuse, NY, “in the coming months,” according to a company press release. During the first phase of TLS-EAB development, both Lockheed and GDMS conducted “soldier touch points” to take feedback and incorporate it into their design phase. 

“Moving into this next phase, we are going to continue to embrace Soldier Touch Points to drive the design while leveraging a proven DevSecOps pipeline and an open architecture that will enable a highly interoperable, configurable 21st Century Security…

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