How spies use gifts
The legend of Troy has given us the phrase 'beware Greeks baring gifts'. When the Trojan army pulled the wooden horse inside the city gates they did not know there was danger concealed within.
For a business surveillance operative, the chance to get a spying tool (camera, audio bug or data logging tool) inside an office without even going there in person is obviously one they would relish, and some have thought up some sneaky ways to achieve it.
I heard a tale the other day of a gift sent to a managing director of a large firm. It was a clock. Not just any old clock but one that "checks the time accoring to the 'world time center' every hour and is thus accurate to within one second every 2.6 million years."
Cool gift! It uses GSM (mobile phone) technology to send and receive checking signals, it looked great and hey, it was a free promo from a major executive car manufacturer.
Except of course it wasn't. The whole thing was a ruse to get spying equipment into the MD's office.
The MD even used the thoughtfully included ac adaptor to plug it into the wall so there wasn't even a limited lifespan due to batteries running out.
The spooks knew the clock would be ignored by the in-house security sweeps who expected the device to register on their scanner as sending and receiving GSM signals. The makers were even bold enough to remind them about 'possible interference with telephones' on the side of the clock housing. So the security team ignored the signals as false positives and declared the office to be bug free.
As always there is a good ending to the story. The spies who made the clock made one mistake. The actual clock workings were so cheap that it stopped displaying the time after a month and when the boss asked IT to take a look they found components they couldn't identify.
They then called in a professional TSCM team and discovered the true nature of this trojan horse.
So, the phrase written by Virgil over 2,000 years ago about being wary
of gifts holds true today.
