Restoring Confidentiality
One of our specialized services is the bug sweep, officially called a Technical Surveillance Countermeasures (TSCM) examination. Some years ago, a law firm asked us to come to their offices to perform one. The firm’s managing partner had found what he believed was a listening device hidden behind a picture frame on a shelf in his office.
When we arrived, our investigators examined the device and confirmed that it was a miniature voice-activated recorder designed to look like an ordinary USB flash drive. They connected it to a forensic workstation to review its contents and found several days’ worth of audio recordings. [For a law firm, that meant privileged conversations with clients may have been compromised.]
Our investigators connected the device to a forensic workstation and found several days’ worth of audio recordings.
Our investigators then swept the rest of the firm’s offices for additional devices using an array of sophisticated electronic detection tools. During the sweep, one of our investigators found the packaging for the recorder inside an employee’s desk drawer.
We then examined the employee’s workstation computer and recovered more audio files containing several weeks’ worth of recordings of the partner talking in his office. The device and the workstation were collected as evidence, and the employee was fired the next day.