Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Hezbollah's use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles - UAVs

According to the common wisdom, terrorists -- or let's just say contradictive political fractions -- weren't supposed to be capable of owning the using unmanned aerial vehicles in war conflicts, but be only able to wage guerilla warfare thus balancing the unequal forces in a conflict. Seems like Hezbollah are indeed capable of owning and using UAVs, as Israel recently shot down yet another one :

"Israeli aircraft shot down an unmanned spy plane launched by the Lebanese guerrilla group Hizbollah as it entered Israeli territory on Monday, the Israeli army said. The drone was spotted by the air force's monitoring unit and fighter planes were scrambled to intercept it, an Israeli military spokesman said. The spokesman said a fighter plane shot the drone down 10 km (six miles) off Israel's coast, northwest of the city of Haifa. "The current assessment is that it was headed further south, we do not know exactly for what purpose," the spokesman said. An Israeli military source added that it was an Iranian-made drone with a range of about 150 km."

Go through an in-depth post at DefenseTech, and Eugene Miasnikov's report on Threat of Terrorism Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Technical Aspects, which :

"assesses the technical possibility of UAV use as a delivery means for terrorists. The analysis shows that such a threat does exist and that it will grow. The author also considers areas that require higher attention from government agencies. This report is also targeted at the Russian public. Terrorist activity can be prevented only through the coordinated efforts of the government and civil society. The government cannot efficiently fight terrorists without the active involvement of the population. The first step toward creating such an alliance is to recognize the threat and its potential consequences."

So what's next once reconnaissance is taken care of and timely intelligence gathered? UCAVs in the long term, of course. Nothing's impossible, the impossible just takes a little while!

HP Spying on Board of Directors' Phone Records

Whether a healthy paranoia, or a series of detailed leaks to the press on HP's future long term strategy, it prompted HP's chair woman to hire experts that obtained access to the call histories of its board of directors' home and cell phone communications thinking possible insiders :

"Last January, the online technology site CNET published an article about the long-term strategy at HP, the company ranked No. 11 in the Fortune 500. While the piece was upbeat, it quoted an anonymous HP source and contained information that only could have come from a director. HP’s chairwoman, Patricia Dunn, told another director she wanted to know who it was; she was fed up with ongoing leaks to the media going back to CEO Carly Fiorina’s tumultuous tenure that ended in early 2005. According to an internal HP e-mail, Dunn then took the extraordinary step of authorizing a team of independent electronic-security experts to spy on the January 2006 communications of the other 10 directors-not the records of calls (or e-mails) from HP itself, but the records of phone calls made from personal accounts. That meant calls from the directors’ home and their private cell phones."

The case highlights that :
- Classification programs type of protection is rarely utilized of companies aiming to balance the trade off of achieving productivity while keep the left hand not knowing what the right is doing when it's necessary -- remember it's the HP way and the management by open spaces that made the company what it is today
- Didn't bother to disinform suspicious parties and decoy them, thus limiting the circle of "suspects"
- Didn't build transparency into the process and that's just starting to make impact
- It's shorthsighted thinking on whether the information defined as leaked wasn't easy to construct through public sources, or that the internal changes weren't already spotted by industry analysts
- They're about to lose their current talanted HR, and the one that was about to join HP. Soft HR dollars are on stake, as I can imagine what will be the faith of a HP blogger if that's how board of directors members threat each other

Here's the article of question, and what provoked this to happen :

"According to the source, HP is considering making more acquisitions in the infrastructure software arena. Those acquisitions would include security software companies, storage software makers and software companies that serve the blade server market. The acquisitions would dovetail with HP's growth plans for its Technology Systems Group, which has already bought companies such as AppIQ for storage management. Hurd has previously said market trends indicate a movement away from mainframe computers and a shift to blade servers, as well as virtualized storage. HP is likely to follow those trends. Meanwhile, in HP's Imaging & Printing Group, the long-term plan to develop commercial printers is likely to continue. "We want to develop the next Heidelberg press," the source said. Of course, HP said basically the same thing back in 2002."

In a previous post, When Financial and Information Security Risks are Supposed to Intersect, I commented on Morgan Stanley's case of knowing who did what, and the growing enforcement of security policies, thus firing employees violating them by forwarding sensitive information to home email accounts. But with the media trying to generate buzz while keeping it objective by mentioning its "sources" and putting the emphasise on "inside company source" no wonder HP is thinking insiders, rather than talkative directors who when asked does the Sun come out in the morning and goes down in the evening, would think twice before answering -- and question the question itself!

Privacy monster courtesy of the EFF.

Related resources and posts:
Espionage
Insider
Wiretapping
Surveillance
Smoking Emails
Insider Competition in the Defense Industry
Espionage Ghosts Busters