5 Gadgets That A Good Spy Can’t Live Without

Whether you are an amateur or a professional, gadgets play an essential role in the life of a spy. Although there are some tools and gadgets which are only designed for specific situations that you may encounter as a spy, there are other gadgets which can be useful to you every single day. If you are a spy and don’t have these five gadgets, you are missing some valuable tools from your arsenal:

1) Portable Bug Detector-As a spy, you are responsible for not only obtaining information, but also keeping privileged information completely secret. Whether you are concerned about a phone, room or car bug, a portable bug detector can provide you with the security you need. Portable bug detectors are extremely easy to operate, and allow you to quickly decide whether or not it is safe to divulge confidential information in your current environment. Best of all, portable bug detectors are easy to conceal, which means that you can take one everywhere you go.

2) Room Bug-Although you need a portable bug detector to protect yourself, the primary job of a spy is surveillance. In order to do this, you need to know what other people are talking about. The best way to accomplish this is with a room bug. You can place a room bug in any environment, and then listen to the conversation from a secure location. Because they can only be picked up by radio scanners, Ultra High Frequency (UHF) room bugs are your best option.

3) Binoculars-Since a lot of your surveillance will take place from a distance, it is important to have a pair of binoculars with you. Having a quality pair of binoculars can mean the difference between whether or not you are successfully able to identify someone.

4) Audio and Video Recorder-This is the gadget that the general population almost always associates with spies. An audio and video recorder will allow you to obtain and preserve valuable information and evidence.

5) Notepad-This may seem overly obvious, but many spies neglect to carry a notepad with them. Whether its writing down a license plate number or a description of a suspicious person, a notepad is arguably the most important tool a spy can carry.

Setting Up and Securing Your Wireless Network

There are more and more individuals opting to work from home than ever before. The advantages to this are many including avoiding the morning and evening rush hours, being able to spend time with your kids and significant other, and doing everything on your own time. Though the pitfalls are many, the one that I will be focusing on in this article is that of setting up a secure wireless network for your home based business. Right now somewhere out there, there is someone with a receiver waiting to pick up on an unsuspecting person’s wireless local area network. Their hope is to garner some sensitive information that may lead to identity theft, and stolen proprietary business information.

Most businesses owners are not technically inclined, though they may be power users, in general security settings is not one of the first things they want to mess around with in their day to day operations. This makes most wireless LANs a great target for information predators.

Here are some general guidelines to follow in setting up your wireless network. Though it may vary from vendor to vendor, the gist is more or less the same:

1. Setup the wireless access/router point via a wired client.
2. Always change the factory setting password to something difficult for someone to guess.
3. Enable 128-bit Wired Equivalency Privacy (WEP) encryption on both your access point and network card. From time to time change the WEP key entries. If your hardware does not support a minimal of 128 bit WEP encryption, then it may be time to replace this dinosaur. WEP is only a minimal security precaution, which is better than none at all.
4. Alter the factory default SSID on the access/router point to a convoluted difficult to guess string. Initiate your computer to connect to this configured SSID by default.
5. Setup your access point not to broadcast the SSID if available.
6. Block off anonymous internet requests and pings.
7. P2P Connections should be disabled.
8. Enable MAC filtering.
9. Enable firewall on the network router/access point with demilitarized zone function disabled. Enable client firewalls for each computer in the network.
10. Update router and access point firmware as updates become available.
11. Make sure the physical router is hidden so that a random person can’t reset the settings.
12. Position the physical router near the middle of the establishment as opposed to near windows to prevent others outside from receiving the signals.

These and other settings will collectively help prevent any unwanted intrusions on your private data.