stories filed under: "monitoring"

Germany To Put Special Monitoring Software On School Computers To Search For Infringement

from the preserving-monopolies-at-any-cost dept

Tue, Nov 1st 2011 7:14am — Glyn Moody

Just under a month ago, the "Chaos Computer Club" (CCC), which styles itself as "the largest European hacker club", had some disturbing news for Germans:

The largest European hacker club, "Chaos Computer Club" (CCC), has reverse engineered and analyzed a "lawful interception" malware program used by German police forces. It has been found in the wild and submitted to the CCC anonymously. The malware can not only siphon away intimate data but also offers a remote control or backdoor functionality for uploading and executing arbitrary other programs. Significant design and implementation flaws make all of the functionality available to anyone on the internet.

Since then, a debate has raged about the extent to which these technologies are permitted by German law when tackling crime. But now it seems that such electronic spying is being institutionalized further thanks to a deal between the Culture Ministers of the German States and publishers of educational materials that allows school computers to be searched annually for unauthorised copies (post in German on Netzpolitik.org): There it has been contractually agreed that 1% of school computers [in Germany] shall be investigated with the help of a "school trojan" for "plagiarism", by which is meant copyright infringement.
Nor is this some mere statistical exercise: there will be real consequences for school authorities and teachers accused of having unauthorized copies: "Upon notice of infractions against this contract's conditions for the reproduction of copyright-protected works, the German States undertake to institute disciplinary measures against the school management and teaching staff involved." Civil and criminal claims of rights-holders naturally remain intact. This then represents a further sanction if, with the help of this sniffer software, teachers are caught copying.
Although the spyware has not yet been introduced, the contract was signed last December and came into force in January this year. It is yet another example of politicians and their advisers agreeing to what look like easy technical fixes to issues, but not thinking through the consequences.

As the Netzpolitik.org article asks: who will be responsible for ensuring that the spy software does its job without breaking the German data protection laws? Has anyone thought about the security issues of introducing this software into schools? Will the software work on all platforms - and if it doesn't, what happens to schools using Macs or GNU/Linux?

Even leaving aside such issues, you have to wonder what on earth the German States' Culture Ministers were thinking when they agreed to allow this gross invasion of privacy of teachers and students. Perhaps they hoped that the fuss would all blow over after a while; in the wake of the other revelations about the German government spying on its citizens through software on their computers, that seems unlikely now.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: germany, monitoring, privacy, schools, spying

11 Comments

China Monitors WiFi, US Takes Notes?

Privacy

from the but-but-THEY-are-doing-it dept

Wed, Jul 27th 2011 2:08pm — Chris Rhodes

In a move that perhaps surprises no one, China is now requiring all providers of free WiFi to install expensive monitoring software that tracks their users, or face heavy fines. According to the officials in the Dongcheng Public Security Bureau, the rules are in place to catch people who "conduct blackmail, traffic goods, gamble, propagate damaging information and spread computer viruses." And I'm sure if they just happen to catch a political dissident here and there, well, that would just be a fortuitous turn of events.

I think even the least cynical among us can see what the real aim is here. What concerns me, however, is how the US will respond.

If history is any indication, US officials will denounce this as a restriction on free speech, while at the same time making sure to vigorously support such restrictions at home. They'll probably decry the new Chinese efforts as privacy invasive while doing their best to make ISPs retain data on customers for law enforcement use. No doubt they will have strong words to say about internet censorship around the globe while they craft bills to take down websites with little or no due process. In fact, the very notion of open WiFi itself has been under siege for quite some time. Operating an open connection can already get your internet disconnected, or have your house raided by a swat team. With all that hypocrisy in mind, the next step for the US with regard to open WiFi seems pretty clear.

Lest you think I am engaging in hyperbole, perhaps an exercise is in order. All we need to do is to adjust the stated goals of the Chinese to match current US culture and politics:

1. "Blackmail" is not a hot button issue here, so they might want to claim the needed data retention policies are to stop child porn instead. That always sells well.
2. "Traffic Goods" sounds an awful lot like trading in counterfeit goods. And of course we know that selling fake medicine is just like copyright infringement.
3. "Gambling" is easy enough. We already seize poker sites. We even set up our own fake payment sites so we can steal money from gamblers too!
4. "Propagate damaging information?" What could be more damaging than wikileaks, which we're trying desperately to charge with something (anything!).
5. "Spread computer viruses" fits nicely into the current cybercrime fear-mongering.

Can anyone honestly say that they can't see a US politician standing up tomorrow to announce that we need to start monitoring our own open WiFi connections to stop "child pornography, copyright infringement, online gambling, disclosure of national secrets, and cybercrime?" That's practically the holy grail of political grandstanding, and what politician is going to speak out against that?

Filed Under: china, monitoring, wifi

14 Comments

France Suspends 3 Strikes Monitoring Following Data Breach

from the oops dept

Tue, May 17th 2011 7:07pm — Mike Masnick

Over the weekend, TorrentFreak reported that the company that French "three strikes and you're off the internet" agency Hadopi had hired to help it track down infringers, Trident Media Guard, had been hacked, though, in reality it appears to be much more of a simple data breach caused by TMG poor setup. The breach left open a lot of details of the tracking system, including IP addresses linked to the whole 3 strikes process. In response, it appears that Hadopi has "temporarily suspended" its work with TMG, perhaps to measure the damage and see if it can actually learn to lock down its computers. In the meantime, however, as TorrentFreak points out, there are no other providers doing this monitoring -- meaning that (at least for a little while), it appears 3 strikes monitoring has stopped in France.

Filed Under: breach, copyright, france, monitoring
Companies: hadopi, triton media group

10 Comments

Samsung Accused Of Installing Secret Keyloggers On New Laptops 'To Monitor Performance' [Updated]

Computers

from the that's-not-going-to-go-over-well dept

Wed, Mar 30th 2011 2:03pm — Mike Masnick

See update at the bottom

According to a report by Mohamed Hassan at Network World, Samsung has been installing secret keyloggers on laptops. After setting up a new laptop, he ran a scan and found an installation of StarLogger, a commercial keylogger program. It's a rather nefarious piece of software:

This key logger is completely undetectable and starts up whenever your computer starts up. See everything being typed: emails, messages, documents, web pages, usernames, passwords, and more. StarLogger can email its results at specified intervals to any email address undetected so you don't even have to be at the computer your[sic] are monitoring to get the information. The screen capture images can also be attached automatically to the emails as well as automatically deleted.

Hassan claims to have found the same keylogger on two separate laptops from Samsung, and after calling the company, finally had a supervisor claim that the company did it to monitor usage:

On March 1, 2011, I called and logged incident 2101163379 with Samsung Support (SS). First, as Sony BMG did six years ago, the SS personnel denied the presence of such software on its laptops. After having been informed of the two models where the software was found and the location, SS changed its story by referring the author to Microsoft since "all Samsung did was to manufacture the hardware." When told that did not make sense, SS personnel relented and escalated the incident to one of the support supervisors.

The supervisor who spoke with me was not sure how this software ended up in the new laptop thus put me on hold. He confirmed that yes, Samsung did knowingly put this software on the laptop to, as he put it, "monitor the performance of the machine and to find out how it is being used."

Of course, it's entirely possible that the supervisor was confused as well. Frankly, like some others, I find it hard to believe that Samsung corporate policy could be so clueless as to install secret keyloggers on all laptops. If it is true, however, I imagine the company will be facing one hell of a lawsuit in the very near future.

Update: It looks like my skepticism on this story may have been justified. Samsung is claiming that the researcher got a false positive, and confused a language folder for a keylogger:

"Our findings indicate that the person mentioned in the article used a security program called VIPRE that mistook a folder created by Microsoft�s Live Application for a key logging software, during a virus scan.

"The confusion arose because VIPRE mistook Microsoft's Live Application multi-language support folder, labelled 'SL,' as StarLogger. Depending on the language, under C:\Windows folders are created labelled 'SL' for Slovene, 'KO' for Korean, 'EN' for English."

Filed Under: keylogger, monitoring, rootkit
Companies: samsung

41 Comments

Is Project Vigilant A Hoax?

Rumors, Conspiracies, etc.

from the looking-questionable dept

Tue, Aug 3rd 2010 1:52pm — Mike Masnick

We just wrote about the new publicity campaign from a group called Project Vigilant, linking to three separate articles discussing how it was a private organization monitoring internet traffic and providing it to the US government. The whole thing seemed dubious on a legal basis, and now plenty of people are questioning whether or not the whole thing is real or some sort of hoax or publicity stunt. Julian Sanchez points out that the "parent company" behind the Project, one "BBHC Global" looks painfully amateurish (and right now appears down). Then, a bunch of security experts are skeptical of the whole concept, noting that if it's been around for 14 years, how come no one's heard of it, and it hasn't participated in any serious security efforts. Others point out that it's almost certainly a publicity stunt of some kind, pointing out that the website was registered just last year. The suggestion there is it's an attempt to jumpstart a new security company. I'm guessing it's more of a hoax to try to show how gullible some people are.

Filed Under: hoax, monitoring, project vigilant, security
Companies: project vigilant

18 Comments

Which ISPs Hand Private Surfing Info Over To Secretive Private Group Who Monitors It For The Feds?

Privacy

from the feeling-safe? dept

Tue, Aug 3rd 2010 11:45am — Mike Masnick

So this is just bizarre. I saw a Wired report about a talk by a guy named Chet Uber, who claimed he helped connect Adrian Lamo to the feds in order to turn in Bradley Manning (the Army intelligence analyst accused of leaking content to Wikileaks), but Uber's little talk raised a number of other issues unrelated to Manning/Lamo. Specifically, towards the end of this Forbes piece about Uber and his organization, Project Vigilant comes a little shocker about how the firm spies on internet traffic for the US government:

According to Uber, one of Project Vigilant's manifold methods for gathering intelligence includes collecting information from a dozen regional U.S. Internet service providers (ISPs). Uber declined to name those ISPs, but said that because the companies included a provision allowing them to share users' Internet activities with third parties in their end user license agreements (EULAs), Vigilant was able to legally gather data from those Internet carriers and use it to craft reports for federal agencies. A Vigilant press release says that the organization tracks more than 250 million IP addresses a day and can "develop portfolios on any name, screen name or IP address."

"We don't do anything illegal," says Uber. "If an ISP has a EULA to let us monitor traffic, we can work with them. If they don't, we can't."

And whether that massive data gathering violates privacy? The organization says it never looks at personally identifying information, though just how it defines that information isn't clear, nor is how it scrubs its data mining for sensitive details.

Uh... what? Given the uproar and then Congressional smackdown to ISPs that tried to monitor such information for advertising purposes, that doesn't seem right at all. Sneaking a clause into an EULA saying that it's handing all your info over to a private party who will monitor it for the feds (maybe) and whoever else they want doesn't really seem aboveboard or legal despite the claims. It's also highly unlikely that it "never looks at personally identifying information." Nearly everyone who's ever claimed that has been proven wrong later.

The whole thing seems really sketchy, and as Glenn Greenwald notes, it appears to be an attempt to skirt the law:

There are serious obstacles that impede the Government's ability to create these electronic dossiers themselves. It requires both huge resources and expertise. Various statutes enacted in the mid-1970s -- such as the Privacy Act of 1974 -- impose transparency requirements and other forms of accountability on programs whereby the Government collects data on citizens. And the fact that much of the data about you ends up in the hands of private corporations can create further obstacles, because the tools which the Government has to compel private companies to turn over this information is limited (the fact that the FBI is sometimes unable to obtain your "transactional" Internet data without a court order -- i.e., whom you email, who emails you, what Google searches you enter, and what websites you visit --is what has caused the Obama administration to demand that Congress amend the Patriot Act to vest them with the power to obtain all of that with no judicial supervision).

But the emergence of a private market that sells this data to the Government (or, in the case of Project Vigilance, is funded in order to hand it over voluntarily) has eliminated those obstacles. As a result, the Government is able to circumvent the legal and logistical restrictions on maintaining vast dossiers on citizens, and is doing exactly that. While advertisers really only care about your online profile (IP address) in order to assess what you do and who you are, the Government wants your online activities linked to your actual name and other identifying information.

So, since Uber and Project Vigilant won't say who these 12 ISPs are, can anyone help us out? What are the 12 ISPs out there who, via sneaky language in their EULAs are simply handing over your private data to some company to sell to the US government?

Filed Under: government, isps, monitoring
Companies: project vigilant

38 Comments

United Arab Emirates And Saudi Arabia Banning Blackberry Usage

Free Speech

from the can't-be-monitored dept

Mon, Aug 2nd 2010 4:00pm — Mike Masnick

Ash Crill alerts us to the news that the United Arab Emirates has announced plans to ban the use of Blackberries, and that Saudi Arabia has announced its intention to do the same. The issue is one we've seen before. The way the Blackberry works is all the data is encrypted and sent through RIM's servers. This pisses off governments who want to spy on the data. RIM, in the past, has noted that it has no way of spying on the email, even if some governments claim to have figured it out anyway (a claim that seems somewhat dubious as that same government later demanded RIM break the encrytpion again). It appears that a lot of folks in the UAE are quite upset about this -- especially as parts of the UAE (Dubai in particular) have spent the last decade plus trying to present themselves as an ideal place for foreign business activity.

Filed Under: blackberry, email, monitoring, saudi arabia, united arab emirates
Companies: rim

13 Comments

Pentagon: If You Don't Let The US Gov't Spy On Your Network, You Place American Lives At Risk

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the moral-panics? dept

Fri, May 28th 2010 7:58am — Mike Masnick

The whole "cyberterorrism" fear mongering is being taken to even more extreme levels. At the Strategic Command Cyber Symposium, William Lynn III, the deputy defense secretary apparently told the audience that companies who operate critical infrastructure need to let the US install monitoring equipment or it puts everyone at risk. The NSA has apparently developed a monitoring system called Einstein (I wonder if they paid the license fee), and want to let companies "opt-in" to installing the gov't's system on their own systems, or face the "wild west" and put everyone at risk. This sounds like blatant fear mongering to let the government tap into all sorts of private infrastructure systems. After all, the government has shown, time and time again, that once it gets access to information, it doesn't take those whole "oversight" or "privacy rights" issues particularly seriously.

Filed Under: cyberwar, einstein, government, monitoring, networks

37 Comments

UK Police Tell Cybercafe Owners 'We're Not Asking You To Spy On Users... But Spy On Users'

Legal Issues

from the that-thing-we-said-about-not-spying-on-users?-yeah,-ignore-that dept

Mon, Mar 29th 2010 1:45am — Mike Masnick

Over in the UK, police are apparently going around to various cybercafes and telling the owners and operators to be observant about what customers are doing, even to the point of examining the hard drives of the public computers after people have used them. Amusingly, the police then say, "It's not about asking owners to spy on their customers..." -- except that it is. The recommendations specifically included "encouraging people to check on hard drives." But that's not spying?

Filed Under: cybercafes, monitoring, uk

22 Comments

Kiddie Monitoring Software Spying On IM Chats, Selling Info To Marketers

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the yeah,-that'll-go-over-well dept

Wed, Sep 9th 2009 12:56am — Mike Masnick

There are a bunch of different "child filtering/monitoring" software on the market these days, and many parents use it to help them keep track of what their kids do online. I have no problem with this -- so long as such filters aren't mandated by the government. But it appears that just selling the tools isn't enough for some companies. JJ sends in the news that one of the top providers in the space doesn't just monitor what kids do for parents, but collects all the data -- including the text of chat room discussions -- and resells it to marketers. You have to imagine that this isn't exactly what the FTC (or parents) expects of such tools.

The company defends the practice, claiming that the data is anonymized and no identifiable data is included -- but we've heard that before. Every single time someone insists their data is anonymized, news breaks showing that it is not. I don't think there's anything wrong, necessarily, with doing targeted marketing programs, but using unsuspecting parents and getting them to install filters and monitoring software, without realizing the data will be handed over to marketing firms, seems pretty sleazy.

Filed Under: kids, marketing, monitoring, privacy

16 Comments

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Germany To Put Special Monitoring Software On School Computers To Search For Infringement

from the preserving-monopolies-at-any-cost dept

China Monitors WiFi, US Takes Notes?

from the but-but-THEY-are-doing-it dept

France Suspends 3 Strikes Monitoring Following Data Breach

from the oops dept

Samsung Accused Of Installing Secret Keyloggers On New Laptops 'To Monitor Performance' [Updated]

from the that's-not-going-to-go-over-well dept

Is Project Vigilant A Hoax?

from the looking-questionable dept

Which ISPs Hand Private Surfing Info Over To Secretive Private Group Who Monitors It For The Feds?

from the feeling-safe? dept

United Arab Emirates And Saudi Arabia Banning Blackberry Usage

from the can't-be-monitored dept

Pentagon: If You Don't Let The US Gov't Spy On Your Network, You Place American Lives At Risk

from the moral-panics? dept

UK Police Tell Cybercafe Owners 'We're Not Asking You To Spy On Users... But Spy On Users'

from the that-thing-we-said-about-not-spying-on-users?-yeah,-ignore-that dept

Kiddie Monitoring Software Spying On IM Chats, Selling Info To Marketers

from the yeah,-that'll-go-over-well dept

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