Identity Theft

Written By Shawn L. Gabriel 11 July 2k8

These days everybody is concerned with identity theft. People are worried about computer network security, dumpster diving for information, telephone phreakers and phishers, computer phishers, and so on. What most people don’t know telephone phreaking and phishing as well as dumpster diving for information has been around longer then ease of computer networking (especially for home use) and the commercialization of the Internet. There is on form of identity theft that no one is concerned with. This is form is call Van Eck monitoring or tempest monitoring. A person named Wm Van Eck first demonstrated the principle and wrote a paper on it. He showed that a typical scanner used to listen to police, fire, and emergency radios can view the signals from the CRT of a conventional television or computer monitor back in 1985. The standard video signal is a standard known signal. It is traveling on wires. These wires act like little antennae. Hence with some decoding circuitry on the scanner’s output side, one can decode the signal. You are thinking that this is why when we type in our passwords or pin numbers it is decoded on the display. This isn’t the reason. The real reason is so that someone standing behind us can’t read it. But the keyboard, mouse, touch screen, hard drive’s, and so on are electronic circuits. As you all know all electronic circuits must have wires or circuit board traces connecting the components to make the electronic device work. These wires and traces are basically the same as small antennae. They too transmit signals. You can view those signals that a scanner picks up on an oscilloscope and decode them yourself. All electronic devices use some sort of standardized high and low signal for its digital or analog signal and they aren’t usually encrypted. With the standardized signals if a device has some sort of encryption, one can analyze the signals with a storage oscilloscope or a digital storage oscilloscope for a laptop or PDA and decode (or crack) it later. Your standard keyboard isn’t encrypted and follows an industry standard; hence you can view the signal and grab keyboard information (i.e. passwords). The other thing is that NO TWO ELECTRONIC OR ELECTRICAL DEVICE IS EXACTLY THE SAME. There are some differences. This may vary from minute to a large change. This eavesdrop method can also be used to track electronic devices. Every vehicle that has an internal combustion engine or electric motor has a slightly different EMF signal from another vehicle as well. Why am I concerned with electronic eavesdropping, is that I am a victim for identity theft back in the early 1990’s due to this. You don’t need to be online to be a victim of this. All you need is to have you electronic or electrical equipment on. I messed up my credit badly when one of my credit cards was stolen via this method. I was at an ATM machine in Grandview, Missouri when someone was viewing my transactions. There were well over 50 complaints about people losing money from their accounts after using that ATM. The ATM machine was checked out thoroughly and it wasn’t tampered with (hardware, software, and via the modem) or a fake ATM. A couple of years later, a person in a run down van was parked in the parking lot where the ATM was located. In this van was a scanner, a computer (with account information on it), and a digital storage oscilloscope. The person that took my credit card information used it to get my other credit information and I ended up with a debt of $35,000.00. I was upset and being young and arguing with the credit card companies about the charges that I didn’t make. I refused to pay on all the charges that I did make as well. This was a big mistake. This affected mood at college with DeVry, my job with Dwyer, and with my close friends. The reason this happened it back in the early 1990’s the miniaturization and mass production of electronic devices made it not practical to repair the equipment. A lot of people that got their electronic tech degrees found themselves looking for new jobs. Colleges were also closing their electronic tech programs. I was the last electronic tech class at Morgan Community College before they closed it. I believe that a very few disgruntled extremely experienced electronic techs started some possible illegal activities with their talent.