Pwned: Russian Rocket-maker Guards Caught Sleeping on the Job

Guard management is perhaps the most important entity in any security infrastructure.  If your on-site security personnel are led properly, they are more vigilant and duty-focused.  However, should your guard supervisors fail to properly lead and conduct regular checks on their personnel, inevitably you will find out just how important knowing the difference between leadership and supervision is.

In Russia, Energomash, the rocket manufacturer of the Soyuz capsules, learned this lesson when fellow bloggers  Lana Sator entered their manufacturing plant while guards were sleeping on duty.  As a former supervisor of security personnel, I can attest there is nothing like having a facility penetrated because your responders were asleep.  To make matters worse, Lana and several of her friends made five visits and each time the guards were asleep.  They gained access to several critical manufacturing sections and posted their exploits online.  As you can imagine, Russian defense and space bureaucrats were not happy and are looking at steep punishments for guards and I'm sure, managers.

Here are some pictures from Lana's blog:

The Russians aren't alone.  In 2009, guards from one of the largest guard companies in the world, Wackenhut, were caught dozing off at a nuclear facility.  Check out the video below:

HOW-TO: Spot a Liar

If you're involved in investigations or ever have need to know if someone is deceiving you, then learning to spot a liar and their "tells" is paramount to your success.  "Tells" are those things in which we all do when telling a lie. Deception was man's first camouflage against other human enemies.  Just like camoflage, deception can be detected if you know what you're looking for.  I HIGHLY recommend watching the video below by Pamela Meyer, a lie detection expert.

According to her site, "Pamela Meyer is founder and CEO of Simpatico Networks, a leading private label social networking company that owns and operates online social networks. She holds an MBA from Harvard, an MA in Public Policy from Claremont Graduate School, and is a Certified Fraud Examiner. She has extensive training in the use of visual clues and psychology to detect deception."

Judging from this video, when they say a woman's intuition is almost always spot-on, I'm inclined to believe they may not be too off.

Click here to obtain a copy of her latest book - Liespotting: Proven Techniques to Detect.

Identity thieves tell their secrets...

Identity theft is a crime that every criminally-minded individual should participate in because it is one of the easiest crimes a person can commit with little to any experience and minute chance of being caught in the act.  This is largely in part to law enforcement agencies and financial institutions being deluged with requests to handle the investigations involved in these transactions to catch every thief.  While there was a significant drop in identity crimes reported, there were 8.1 million adults who reported being victims (myself included).  Moreover, very few victims file reports or know what it is that made them a victim in the first place.

In the report below, CBS News did something very few media outlets have done - interview real identity thieves.  The two ladies featured in this video describe how these crimes are committed and how they often get away with them.  They detail everything from how they obtained false fingerprints to using social engineering to withdraw large sums of money from victims' accounts.  They also provided some good information for banks and consumers.