Category Archives: Spy

34C3: Microphone Bugs

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Inspiration can come from many places. When [Veronica Valeros] and [Sebastian Garcia] from the MatesLab Hackerspace in Argentina learned that it took [Ai Weiwei] four years to discover his home had been bugged, they decided to have a closer look into some standard audio surveillance devices. Feeling there’s a shortage of research on the subject inside the community, they took matters in their own hands, and presented the outcome in their Spy vs. Spy: A modern study of microphone bugs operation and detection talk at 34C3. You can find the slides here, and their white paper here.

Focusing their research …read more

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The line between adware and malware has become increasingly blurred, researcher finds

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An opaque digital marketing firm based in Tel Aviv attempted to silence a group of researchers after they found that the company was responsible for highly intrusive advertising software which infected upwards of 10,000 Apple computers since 2016. New research by Israeli company Cybereason shows that TargetingEdge, a secretive advertising technology firm, had developed and spread “OSX.Pirrit,” a covert piece of software that can manipulate browsers, track users’ activity and forcefully load digital advertisements. These advertisements appear to be scams, including fake, paid Apple customer channels and disreputable anti-virus software downloads. The lead project researcher Amit Serper described OSX.Pirrit as malware due to the program gaining root access to a victim’s device and attempting to remain hidden in order to avoid being uninstalled or tracked by anti-virus products. Cybereason was able to connect OSX.Pirrit to TargetingEdge by studying how the command and control infrastructure behind the adware would call back […]

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Inside an Amateur Bugging Device

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[Mitch] got interested in the S8 “data line locator” so he did the work to tear into its hardware and software. If you haven’t seen these, they appear to be a USB cable. However, inside the USB plug is a small GSM radio that allows you to query the device for its location, listen on a tiny microphone, or even have it call you back when it hears something. The idea is that you plug the cable into your car charger and a thief would never know it was a tracking device. Of course, you can probably think of less …read more

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Eavesdropping With An ESP8266

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In the old days, spies eavesdropped on each other using analog radio bugs. These days, everything’s in the cloud. [Sebastian] from [Hacking Beaver]  wondered if he could make a WiFi bug that was small and cheap besides. Enter the ESP8266 and some programming wizardry.

[Sebastian] is using a NodeMCU but suggests that it could be pared down to any ESP8266 board — with similar cuts made to the rest of the electronics — but has this working as a proof of concept. A PIC 18 MCU samples the audio data from a microphone at 10 kHz with an 8-bit resolution, …read more

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Senator questions DHS’s handling of Kaspersky software ban in federal agencies

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A senior U.S. official pushed back against a Democratic senator’s criticism Thursday concerning the 90-day timeframe provided by the Department of Homeland Security for federal agencies to uninstall Kaspersky Lab products after the technology was linked to Russian intelligence efforts. In an open congressional hearing Thursday, Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill questioned why the Homeland Security Department would offer such a grace period when the threat of foreign espionage is apparently evident. She implied that the Kremlin, if found in a similar situation, would be handling the situation much more rapidly. “You’re giving them a long time,” said McCaskill. “Do you think if this happened in Russia, if they found a system of ours was looking at all their stuff, that they would give their government 90 days to remove it? Seriously? The point I am making I mean is that why don’t you just say you have to remove it […]

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Books You Should Read: The Cuckoo’s Egg

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The mid-1980s were a time of drastic change. In the United States, the Reagan era was winding down, the Cold War was heating up, and the IBM PC was the newest of newnesses. The comparatively few wires stitching together the larger university research centers around the world pulsed with a new heartbeat — the Internet Protocol (IP) — and while the World Wide Web was still a decade or so away, The Internet was a real place for a growing number of computer-savvy explorers and adventurers, ready to set sail on the virtual sea to explore and exploit this new …read more

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Spy Tech: Nonlinear Junction Detectors

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If you ever watch a spy movie, you’ve doubtlessly seen some nameless tech character sweep a room for bugs using some kind of detector and either declare it clean or find the hidden microphone in the lamp. Of course, as a hacker, you have to start thinking about how that would work. If you had a bug that transmits all the time, that’s easy. The lamp probably shouldn’t be emitting RF energy all the time, so that’s easy to detect and a dead give away. But what if the bug were more sophisticated? Maybe it wakes up every hour and …read more

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Radio MDZhB

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If you have a shortwave receiver, tune it to 4625 kHz. You’ll hear something that on the surface sounds strange, but the reality is even stranger still. According to the BBC, the radio station broadcasts from two locations inside Russia — and has since 1982 — but no one claims ownership of the station, known as MDZhB. According to the BBC:

[For 35 years, MDZhB] has been broadcasting a dull, monotonous tone. Every few seconds it’s joined by a second sound, like some ghostly ship sounding its foghorn. Then the drone continues.
Once or twice a week, a man or

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Number Twitters

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Grab a shortwave radio, go up on your roof at night, turn on the radio, and if the ionosphere is just right, you’ll be able to tune into some very, very strange radio stations. Some of these stations are just a voice — usually a woman’s voice — simply counting. Some are Morse code. All of them are completely unintelligible unless you have a secret code book. These are number stations, or radio stations nobody knows much about, but everyone agrees they’re used to pass messages from intelligence agencies to spies in the field.

A few years ago, we took …read more

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