When you think of spies, you never think of a harmless paper shredder.
A few years back, and one of my most meaningful contracts, was to find out and stuff a leak inside and organization with offices six of the seven continents.
I have been introduced to the company through a mutual connection between myself and the chief executive of the organization a question.
Aforementioned CEO was dissatisfied with the work of my predecessors. These had conducted extensive analyses in the organization; but all by the book.
The result was: the leak was still there or not fixed even some $3.5 million later.
The mutual connection I mentioned earlier got a hold of this information and was so Milyer with my out-of-the-box thinking and introduced us through an email upon which I was hired to conduct another analysis to find out where the leak was and to submit a proposal on how to stuff it.
I spent the next next weeks on planes traveling to pretty much all of their facilities and offices around the globe.
Very quickly managed to isolate the office where the leak originated. So for the next weeks I was in that office conducting research as to how the sensitive information got out of the office and into the hands of the competition.
We conducted everything from radio frequency and analysis to exclude the possibility that the information was sent out of the building to the obvious suspects being a leak in the IT infrastructure and even to suspecting certain Individuals in the organization.
None of this yielded any results turning the excitement from the beginning and to somewhat have a frustrating project.
Some weeks later I was sitting in a conference room at 2 AM chewing on a piece of stale pizza that was left over from dinner, while playing carousel with an office chair I was sitting in.
Every time I made a turn a paper shredder caught my attention with the red LED on top.
One of our desperate measures was too exchange parts of the furniture, artwork, and office equipment. This pull through to replacing parts of the coffee canisters placed in that specific meeting room. What we had not taken into consideration previously was the old style of information extraction.
This organization was still rather paper heavy and a lot of the meeting notes were taken on paper; and parts of them disposed through conventional means.
No I was curious to find out whether or not this paper shredder was the culprit. And so 230 in the morning I went to the janitor of the building and asked him for a screwdriver and other tools; if you want to know that you’re right, he wants and village at that moment!
I opened the case of the paper shredder, disconnected it from the power supply, and as I opened it I saw a perfectly integrated scanner which snapped scans of every piece of paper from both sides before it was destroyed. It’s took me two or three closer looks to find it, and the contraption was brilliantly engineered have to agree where strips were fit it inside so that no light of the scanning process what escape the housing.
Bottom line: the competitor in question went through a lot of trouble to place this device. The cost of engineering it was quite extensive: further, the reason the information was not discovered by the radio frequency analysis is that the middleman of the competitor and bribed One of the cleaning ladies to replace a USB key if they had inserted into the machine on a weekly basis.
So you see: not even are we safe from paper shredders anymore.
