by Micheal Delamere | Jul 20, 2014 | Surveillance & Security
MEXICO CITY — A vaunted plan to create a new security force, known as the Gendarmerie, has been watered down sharply in the past two years but is about to come to fruition.
Sometime in late July, the government of President Enrique Pena Nieto will put the 5,000-member Gendarmerie into action, National Security Commissioner Monte Alejandro Rubido said Friday.
The force will not be anywhere near the scope of what Pena Nieto outlined while running for president back in 2012. At that time, he suggested the new force might have up to 50,000 officers.
Since then, the government has steadily scaled back its vision of the force. By February 2013, a previous national security commissioner, Manuel Mondragon y Kalb, forecast 10,000 gendarmes. Four months after that, Interior Secretary Miguel Angel Osorio Chong announced the force might have only 5,000 people.
In a briefing with foreign reporters Friday, Rubido said Friday that gendarme recruits are getting final training in Colombia. Other nations that have provided assistance include Spain, France, and the United States.
by Micheal Delamere | Jul 10, 2014 | Surveillance & Security
Many mobile device users rely on simply deleting the private information on the storage card of the phone before selling it, in order to ensure that sensitive details are not passed to the new owner. However, items are stored persistently, and unless they are corrupted through overwrite action, they can be recovered.
Avast carried out an experiment with 20 Android phones purchased through eBay, and then tried to find out how much of the deleted information could be retrieved.
The results showed that a numerous amount of items belonging to the previous owners could be recovered by using a mainstream utility.
According to their report, they managed to bring back more than 40,000 photos, and learned about over 1,000 Google searches, more than 750 email and text messages and over 250 contact names and email addresses.
By putting together these bits and pieces, cybercriminals can learn important details about the potential victim and start targeted phishing campaigns with a high rate of success, which could bring them a pretty income.
Blackmailing activities can also be deployed by the criminals, as Avast says that more than 750 of the images retrieved were with women in various stages of nakedness.
Among their findings were the identities of four previous owners, which can also be leveraged to conduct nefarious activities against them.
by Micheal Delamere | Jul 10, 2014 | Surveillance & Security
Rising kidnappings, the discovery of mass graves, and security force shootouts with alleged Zetas members have created a security storm in the state of Veracruz in southeast Mexico, but what lies behind this streak of violence?
On July 2, authorities discovered a clandestine grave containing at least eight bodies in a southern municipality of Veracruz, reported Animal Politico. This followed the June discovery of 12 mass graves in which at least 31 bodies were unearthed.
Accompanying these chilling finds has been a series of shootouts in urban areas of the state, reported Proceso. On July 5, security forces killed six alleged criminals in the city of Veracruz, while three alleged members of the Zetas criminal organization were killed in nearby Orizaba. A day earlier, police killed four suspected Zetas near the coast, including the group’s alleged Veracruz plaza chief — the local leader in charge of that territory.
by Micheal Delamere | Jun 20, 2014 | Surveillance & Security
Roughly 37 percent of companies have fallen victim to crime of some form, including corruption, robbery of merchandise, shoplifting, kidnapping and extortion, the head of the Coparmex employers’ association said
MEXICO CITY – Crime and a climate of insecurity in Mexico cost companies some 75 billion pesos ($5.8 billion) annually, the head of the Coparmex employers’ association said.
Roughly 37 percent of companies have fallen victim to the crime of some form, including corruption, robbery of merchandise, shoplifting, kidnapping, and extortion, Juan Pablo Castañon told a group of foreign correspondents.
by Micheal Delamere | Jun 15, 2014 | Cyber Threats, Data Breaches
The basement-dwelling teenager poring over lines of scrolling code as he rips through the security of a government or corporate server is a popular trope in Hollywood movies. Although this widespread image of the hacker isn’t accurate, the threat of cyberattacks against government networks is very much a real-world concern.
In order to be more prepared for cybersecurity breaches, agencies should consider a comprehensive penetration test – ethical hacking with the goal of attacking or bypassing the established security mechanisms of an agency’s systems, and using the same tactics as a malicious intruder.
Penetration testing can be conducted by way of a cyberattack or by exploiting a physical vulnerability of an organization.
After gaining access to a system, the penetration testers will report back with detailed information about what vulnerabilities were exploited, how they were able to breach the system, what level of data was accessed and how to prevent future exploitation. The following is a compilation of the six most common vulnerabilities found during penetration tests:
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