“The brucella bacteria and the disease it causes, brucellosis, can infect people and animals such as sheep, cattle, goats and pigs,” the decision said.Īnd, Ontario Superior Court of Justice Heather Perkins-McVey said as she sentenced Nielsen to two years in prison, the case made clear that “Canada cannot protect international property.” With him were 17 vials of brucella bacteria packed in a thermos of ice inside a child's lunch bag in carry-on luggage, a 2017 Ontario Court of Justice ruling said. Nielsen was arrested in October 2012 headed to Ottawa airport en route to China. Klaus Nielsen was targeted 20 years ago with espionage techniques aimed at obtaining his research on animal brucellosis, a highly contagious disease transmittable to humans, said RCMP documents obtained by Glacier Media under access to information laws. It’s a revelation that calls into question Canada’s ability to protect scientific research from foreign agents as Parliament debates the possible Canadian origin of the COVID-19 virus and the involvement of Chinese nationals.Ĭanadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) scientist Dr.
#CHINESE ESPIONAGE TECHNIQUES CODE#
“It is still the only unbreakable code system ever created.A Chinese agent successfully targeted at least one government scientist for his infectious disease research, the results of which went to China for commercial use, RCMP documents show. “Since it is random, and you’ve only used it once, you give the crypto guys nothing to work with and thus the code is unbreakable,” says Houghton. Such a pad might be a string of random numbers, each of which is used to move a letter in the message a corresponding number of places forward or backward in the alphabet.
These are ciphers that are used just once before being destroyed. ‘One-time pads’ are another low-tech trick that have stood the test of time. “They decided the best way to do this was to build furniture out of transparent plastic, so that a bug would be easily spotted.” Twinned with sound dampening rooms and white noise generators, the Stasi agents could be confident that their discussions were not privy to eavesdroppers.
“Intelligence wanted a low-tech and low-budget method to ensure its highest-level meetings were unbugged,” explains Houghton. Recommendations for keeping communications and databases secure now include gumming the microphone and USB sockets with glue.Īrchitectural solutions to spyware also popped up in East Germany during the Cold War. It was later confirmed the malware was spreading by high-frequency sounds passed between the speakers of an infected machine and the microphone of its next victim. Last year, security researcher Dragos Ruiu reported evidence that a virus had managed to jump the air gap in his laboratory.
A USB device that appears completely empty can still contain malware, even when formatted, say Nohl and Lell, and there is no practical way to defend against this.Īir gaps can also be crossed by sufficiently cunning programs, which could in principle be used by surveillance agencies to gain access to computer networks and collect information. Recent research from Berlin-based cyber-security experts Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell suggests a new level of threat. Iran kept its uranium enrichment facilities air gapped, but the Stuxnet virus was able to cripple the all-important centrifuges after infected USB drives discarded by spies were plugged in by oblivious workers.
However, an air gap can be difficult to maintain. Physically isolating a computer from the wider net – creating a so-called “air gap” – is another cheap and low-tech solution to evade billion-dollar surveillance systems that is practised by terrorists and state spies alike.
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