Insights
Short pieces on documented cases, new legislation and what they mean for technical security examination in practice. These pieces also appear on LinkedIn. For background on these subjects, see the reference articles in the knowledge base.
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Spies may be sitting not only in cars, but in boardrooms too
The AIVD warns about the modern car. Apply the same questions to the boardroom and the conversation falls strikingly quiet. Opinion piece in Het Financieele Dagblad.
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Espionage by the path of least resistance
Printers, VoIP phones, routers and cameras as the way in. Five GRU and FSB campaigns with one pattern: computers that nobody treats as computers.
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Built into the wall: a camera module costing barely ten euros
Behind a wall thermostat at a Ukrainian drone manufacturer sat commercially available electronics, placed by someone entitled to be there.
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Evil twin: the name checks out, the network does not
During the NATO summit in The Hague a Wi-Fi network appeared under the same name as the legitimate NATO guest network. The AIVD and the police went looking.
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TEMPEST: voting machines and headsets give away what you are doing, at tens of metres
In 2006 the screen of a Dutch voting machine proved reconstructable at forty metres, through a wall. Twenty years on, the same principle applies to headphones.
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The risk of supply chain espionage: a near-undetectable keylogger
In 1984 the NSA removed eleven tons of equipment from the Moscow embassy. The bugs had been bought eight years earlier, built into the typewriters themselves.
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Nearest Neighbor Attack: your network does not stop at the wall
In 2018 the GRU still needed a car park beside the OPCW. Four years later the same service logged in to a target’s Wi-Fi from thousands of kilometres away, through the neighbours.
