Background Checks

Many private investigators offer background checks with their list of services. Background checks examine a person’s history, and may reveal critical information, such as a person’s criminal history, credit, address history, professional history and social connections. A background check may be used for employment purposes or acceptance into a housing complex. Background checks may also be conducted when a person gets romantically involved with another person and wants to check if he or she has any skeletons in the closet. More robust background checks may be used to help provide security clearance to an individual.

Surveillance

A primary reason why someone may hire a private investigator is to have this person conduct surveillance on a target. A person may require surveillance if he or she believes another person is trying to harm him or her, such as checking for a stalker or an abusive ex. Surveillance may also be ordered in civil investigations, such as when an insurance company is attempting to acquire evidence about a person who alleges a serious injury. Cases may involve workers’ compensation, personal injury, corporate fraud, infidelity suspicions and others.

Family Law Matters

Another common reason to hire a private investigator is for a family law matter. Private investigators may be hired in order to gather evidence to use in a civil trial, such as a divorce or child custody battle. They may also be hired to help find a missing person or relocate adopted family members. Private investigators are often used in the divorce context for purposes such as locating hidden assets in a divorce or finding assets if a parent owes child support or spousal support. If a person is receiving alimony, his or her ex-spouse may hire a private investigator to see if the spouse is living with a new romantic partner if this is grounds to terminate spousal support.

Infidelity Investigations

Private investigators may be contacted to investigate suspicions of a cheating spouse. Infidelity investigations are often requested because a person does not know whether a spouse is cheating or not and wants an objective person to conduct surveillance and an investigation to determine if the person’s partner is being unfaithful. Often, a person must witness infidelity with his or her own eyes to believe that a partner is unfaithful. He or she may be reassured frequently of faithfulness only to confirm the opposite.

Various Investigations

Private investigators must often investigate a variety of cases. These investigations are often diverse in nature. Some investigations may involve insurance companies, including car, home, workers’ compensation and life insurance. These investigators may be able to find information that would otherwise go unknown. Investigators may find that people have committed insurance fraud or are attempting to sabotage a business partner or shareholder.

Other cases may involve a close scrutiny of business practices or looking into domestic helpers for abuse or theft. Corporate investigations may look into the legitimacy of a business partner, the loss of information and how it occurred or what people are saying about an owner behind his or her back.

How Private Investigators Work

Private investigators often use a variety of tools to help aid in their investigations. They may use special databases only available to law enforcement or investigators. They may check social media outlets for information concerning a fugitive’s whereabouts or to find someone to conduct process service. They may interview a person’s neighbors and colleagues to conduct a thorough investigation. They may also review electronic and printed documents to locate assets, perform skip traces or to uncover new information. Surveillance may be used to try to keep track of a subject’s movements and transactions.

In addition to finding information, private investigators may assist in other ways. They may provide reports that indicate the type of information found. They may provide photographs or video surveillance. They may testify at court hearings as to what they observed.

Contact a Private Investigator

For more information on how private investigators operate, contact a private investigator in your area. He or she can explain the role of private investigators and the tools that may be utilized to aid in the investigation. He or she can also explain whether the private investigator can complete the type of work that is being requested.

Licensed private investigators have the capability to complete assignments issued by a client, perform surveillance for extended periods and detect and reveal information that may be hidden or unavailable through a usual search. The act of capturing video of a subject may also cause the person or organization to discover they are being recorded. This may then lead to either complications in surveillance or legal action to cease the activity. If the person was perpetrating illegal actions, he or she may then stop doing so until certain that video is not recording these acts. Many private investigators are trained enough in recording a subject so that he or she is unaware of it.

When investigations initiate for relatives or friends, it is important to ensure the parties are within legal compliance so that violations of the law do not occur with any local, state or federal regulations governing licensed private investigators in these situations. If these offenses affect the individual, there are extensive fines that usually cause a significant financial burden along with some jail time in certain instances. It is vital that the professional hired has experience. These contracted investigators provide the greatest amount of safety to clients when taking on a case. This means they are able to handle themselves, are dedicated to the client and attempt to remain hidden at all times.

Skills, Talent and Cost

The training a hired professional has completed usually provides him or her with the skill and talent to use the services acquired for a variety of fields. When the individual must investigate medical, military, financial, relationship and even legal areas, they often have the knowledge and skills to ensure the correct information has been obtained. The quality of service far outweighs the costs when a professional is needed to investigate a subject for someone. This means to hire a quality private investigator; the client usually pays more for services. A greater amount of experience usually means that the PI commits to providing results to his or her client.

Legal Entanglements with Investigations

It is vital that a private investigator be hired for experience and the quality of his or her skills. This translates to testifying in court with abundance so that he or she is equipped to deal with these situations better than someone that charges less for his or her services. He or she will appear professional, have a clean and groomed appearance and be clear and concise when detailing the information, he or she provides.

Private Investigators are usually licensed in multiple states and tested to ensure they have a valid certification. When the individual is of a higher caliber than another with less experience or knowledge, he or she is better at informing the client of information, complications and issues that may arise. This also means that the PI is able to inform the person that hired him or her about any legal issues that may be entangled with the investigation such as violations due to surveillance laws, invasion of privacy, illegal recordings and similar concerns. It is best to hire a private investigator when a search or research is necessary and video recording someone or an entity is better left with the professional that has performed the action for hundreds if not thousands of hours.

Some popular home security cameras could allow would-be burglars to work out when you’ve left the building, according to a study published Monday. Researchers found they could tell if someone was in, and even what they were doing in the home, just by looking at data uploaded by the camera and without monitoring the video footage itself.

The international study was carried out by researchers from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and the Chinese Academy of Science, using data provided by a large Chinese manufacturer of Internet Protocol (IP) security cameras.

Cameras like these allow users to monitor their homes remotely via a video feed on the internet, but the researchers say the traffic generated by the devices can reveal privacy-compromising information.

Popular security cameras such as those manufactured by Nest (pictured here) present the same privacy risk.

Study author Gareth Tyson from QMUL told CNN that data uploads of the unencrypted data increase when a camera is recording something moving, so an attacker could tell if the camera was uploading footage of someone in motion, and even different types of motion like running or sitting.

The risk is that “someone who is specifically targeting an individual household rocks up outside with a device to try and start passively monitoring traffic,” he said.

Tyson told CNN that an attacker would require a decent level of technical knowledge to monitor the data themselves, but there is a chance that someone could develop a program that does so and sell it online.

Noting that he hasn’t seen any direct evidence of this kind of attack taking place, he said one potential use would be if someone wanted to burgle your house.

“They monitor the camera traffic over an extended period of time, and by looking at the patterns that are generated by those cameras over maybe a week, they then start predicting the following week when you’re most likely to be in the house,” he said.

In order to reduce the privacy risk, companies could randomly inject data into their systems to make it harder for attackers to spot a pattern, he said.

A hacker accessed a family Ring security camera and told their 8-year-old daughter he was Santa Claus

A hacker accessed a family’s Ring security camera and told their 8-year-old daughter he was Santa Claus. Tyson said the team are trying to extend their research to work out how to maintain camera performance while reducing privacy risks.

At present, cameras are “fairly stupid items” in order to keep manufacturing costs down, said Tyson, uploading data whenever motion is detected.

“What we want to do is have a more intelligent system that allows the camera to understand what that motion is, assess the level of risk, and only upload it and alert the user in a case where the camera feels that it’s worthy doing,” he said.

For example, someone who owns a cat probably doesn’t want to be alerted every time the camera detects the animal walking around, but they would certainly want to know if a human intruder were spotted.

Tyson said this is the first study to investigate the risks posed by video streaming traffic generated by the cameras.

The global market for the devices is expected to be worth $1.3 billion by 2023, according to the press release. Popular brands include Xiaomi and Nest, which is owned by Google.

While the study authors did not analyze data from those brands, they did find that their cameras present the same privacy risk. CNN has reached out to Nest and Xiaomi for comment on the research.

The study was published at the IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications, which brings together researchers in networking and related field.

A hacker has published this week a massive list of Telnet credentials for more than 515,000 servers, home routers, and IoT (Internet of Things) “smart” devices.

The list, which was published on a popular hacking forum, includes each device’s IP address, along with a username and password for the Telnet service, a remote access protocol that can be used to control devices over the internet.

According to experts to who ZDNet spoke this week, and a statement from the leaker himself, the list was compiled by scanning the entire internet for devices that were exposing their Telnet port. The hacker then tried using (1) factory-set default usernames and passwords, or (2) custom, but easy-to-guess password combinations.

These types of lists — called “bot lists” — are a common component of an IoT botnet operation. Hackers scan the internet to build bot lists and then use them to connect to the devices and install malware.

These lists are usually kept private, although some have leaked online in the past, such as a list of 33,000 home router Telnet credentials that leaked in August 2017. To our knowledge, this marks the biggest leak of Telnet passwords known to date.

Data leaked by a DDoS service operator

As ZDNet understands, the list was published online by the maintainer of a DDoS-for-hire (DDoS booter) service.

When asked why he published such a massive list of “bots,” the leaker said he upgraded his DDoS service from working on top of IoT botnets to a new model that relies on renting high-output servers from cloud service providers.

All the lists the hacker leaked are dated October-November 2019. Some of these devices might now run on a different IP address or use different login credentials.

ZDNet did not use any of the username and password combos to access any of the devices, as this would be illegal — hence we are unable to tell home many of these credentials are still valid.

Using IoT search engines like BinaryEdge and Shodan, ZDNet identified devices all over the world. Some devices were located on the networks of known internet service providers (indicating they were either home router or IoT devices), but other devices were located on the networks of major cloud service providers.

Danger remains

An IoT security expert (who wanted to remain anonymous) told ZDNet that even if some entries on the list are not valid anymore because devices might have changed their IP address or passwords, the lists remain incredibly useful for a skilled attacker.

Misconfigured devices are not evenly spread out across the internet, but they’re usually clustered on the network of one single ISP due to the ISP’s staff misconfiguring the devices when deploying them to their respective customer bases.

An attacker could use the IP addresses included in the lists, determine the service provider, and then re-scan the ISP’s network to update the list with the latest IP addresses.