Report: Evidence suggests HP spied on Dell
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Blog: Hewlett-Packard allegedly obtained 'confidential' material related to Dell's printing business, according to Fortune magazine, citing unnamed former HP employees.
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Hewlett-Packard conducted feasibility   studies on placing spies in news bureaus of two publications as   part of an investigation into leaks from its board, The New   York Times reported on Wednesday.
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New program inspects your hardware Dell will accept any old reason for jumping onto its data center service wagons and sniffing around your machinery.â¦
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By Stephen Foley in New York  Hewlett-Packard is facing a federal investigation into whether the company broke the law when the computer manufacturer obtained directors' and journalists' phone records as part of its attempt to hunt down the source of boardroom leaks.
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Commercial online service was used to track e-mail sent to a reporter in Hewlett-Packard's leak probe, investigator testifies. Images: Commercial e-mail tracking
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Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) has submitted thousands of documents to a House subcommittee looking into how the company tracked down boardroom leaks.
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(InfoWorld) - A U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee probing theÂ Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) pretexting case has issued more subpoenas to compel witness testimony at a Thursday hearing. The Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the Energy and Commerce Committee issued subpoenas Wednesday for five people identified as "pretexters," data brokers who sometimes obtain access to confidential records under false pretenses. HP has been embroiled in a scandal over its hiring of private investigators who engaged in possibly illegal pretexting to investigate news leaks from HP's board to reporters. Served with subpoenas, according to the Subcommittee, are: Bryan Wagner, a private investigator from Littleton, Colorado; Charles Kelly, of the CAS Agency in Villa Rica, Georgia; Cassandra Selvage of Eye in the Sky Investigations, of Dade City, Florida; Darren Brost, of Austin, Texas; and Valerie Preston from InSearchOf Inc., of Cooper City, Florida. Wagner was identified in a Wednesday Wall Street Journal article as a suspect in the pretexting of phone records of HP directors, employees and journalists who cover the Palo Alto, California technology company. The Journal reported that Wagner told an investigator that he smashed his computer to pieces with a hammer, destroying data that was saved on it. The article also said that the destruction of the computer may hamper an investigation by California Attorney General Bill Lockyer's office into possible illegal activity by people at HP or by the private investigators HP hired. The five who were subpoenaed Wednesday have been added to a list of witnesses that also includes HP's Chief Executive Officer and President Mark Hurd and former board chairman Patricia Dunn, who resigned last Friday because of the scandal. While Dunn and Hurd have volunteered to appear, two other HP executives involved in the investigation were subpoenaed: senior counsel Kevin Hunsaker and Global Security Manager Anthony Gentilucci. Hunsaker "left the company" and Gentilucci "resigned" effective Tuesday, said HP spokesman Ryan Donovan. Also subpoenaed are Ron DeLia, operator of Security Outsourcing Solutions Inc., a Needham, Massachusetts, private investigations firm, and Joe Depante, owner of Action Research Group, of Melbourne, Florida. HP has acknowledged hiring both those firms in its leak investigation and that they used pretexting to track down personal phone records. Â
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Dell raced further ahead of rival Hewlett-Packard in the worldwide PC market during the third quarter, according to new research. In separate reports released on Monday, Gartner and IDC both found that the
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-PackardÂ Chief Executive Officer and President Mark Hurd Friday confirmed that he approved a probe of HP employees, board members and journalists in an effort to find out who on the HP board was leaking confidential information outside of the company. However, Hurd said he did not approve the placement of tracing technology in an e-mail to a journalist, and apologized for this and any other "inappropriate" tactics -- such as physical surveillance and obtaining phone records under false pretenses, known as "pretexting" -- that HP undertook in its investigation to find the source of information leaks. "I extend my sincere apology to those journalists who were investigated and to everyone who was impacted," Hurd said. "The inappropriate techniques that were applied do not reflect the value of HP. ... These are not indicative of how we conduct business at HP." Hurd also said he accepted the resignation of Patricia Dunn from her position as chairman of the HP board and a director, effective immediately, and thanked her for her eight years of service on HP's board. Previously, Dunn was to stay on as a director of the board, but would step down as chairman in January. Hurd now takes on the role of chairman of HP's board. HP also appointed Bart M. Schwartz, a former U.S. prosecutor, as board counsel. His role will be to perform an independent review of investigative methods and the company's Standards of Business Conduct processes, and to make future recommendations for implementing best practices. He will report to Hurd and HP Chief Financial Officer Bob Wayman. Hurd said that HP had the "best intentions" when it began the first of two phases of a probe into boardroom leaks, but said it "turned in a direction we could not have anticipated" and he takes full accountability for what transpired. "I take this very seriously and commit to getting to the bottom of this," he said. "Our job is to fix this and get back to the job of running the business." Hurd did not field reporter questions at the press conference, at which HP searched attendees' bags and did not allow video cameras. Hurd plans to appear at an U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations hearing about HP's investigation on Thursday, Sept. 28., and said he did not want questions on Friday to interfere with that testimony. Mike Holston, a partner with law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP, also spoke at the press conference on Friday. HP appointed the firm, which reports directly to Hurd, on Sept. 8 to investigate the tactics used by HP and third-party investigators in its probe. Holston said his firm has read more than 1 million pages of documents about two internal HP investigations -- called Kona 1 and Kona 2 -- and is still in the process of putting together the details of what took place. He declined to identify by name the people HP investigated. However, Holston did confirm that HP worked with two third-party organizations -- Security Outsourcing Services and Action Research Group -- to investigate employees, board members and/or former board members and their families, and journalists and their families. That investigation included physical surveillance, obtaining social security numbers of those being investigated to obtain phone records and the placement of e-mail tracing technology in an e-mail to one journalist, he said. Friday's news conference followed a steady stream of news reports over the last two weeks with revelations of actions HP and its outside investigators allegedly took to discover the source of company leaks to the media. Schemes allegedly considered included an attempt to plant spies inside the San Francisco newsrooms of The Wall Street Journal and CNET Networks Inc. posing as clerical workers or janitors, and a sting operation in which a fake anonymous source within HP would e-mail CNET reporter Dawn Kamamoto with a tip and track her e-mails to see if she contacted her other HP sources about the tip. Holston said Friday that while there was evidence that HP considered starting undercover operations in the newsrooms of the Journal and CNET, there is no evidence that such operations ever took place. He also confirmed that HP did try to track one reporterâs e-mail through tracing technology, but did not name the reporter involved and said there was no evidence at this time that the HP investigation team was aware that the tracer was activated.
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By Purva Patel and Anastasia Ustinova, Houston Chronicle  Sep. 19--It was all about business at Hewlett-Packard's technology forum in Houston on Monday, despite the continuing fallout over a company-ordered investigation of board members to find the source of leaks to reporters.
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Hewlett-Packard board members and journalists were under physical surveillance by investigators trying to find out who was providing information to reporters, and private investigators tried to put tracking software on a journalist's computer to keep tabs on e-mail, according to a New York Times report.
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Hewlett-PackardÂs spying operation included monitoring an employeeÂs instant-messaging exchanges with a reporter at The Wall Street Journal.
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By MATT SLAGLE   Associated Press writer  HOUSTON -- Hewlett-Packard Co.
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(InfoWorld) - It happens every year: as the calendar gets ready to turn over, we get an itch to pause, to be quiet, to reflect. Thatâs probably why âyear in reviewâ stories are so popular at this time of year: they channel a seasonal compunction among editors and readers alike. But what to make of 2006? Itâs a year in which some enterprises and IT firms made bold moves to set themselves on a new course, while others failed, in spectacular fashion, to learn the lessons of the past. For this penultimate Tech Watch, we review the year with the aid of some pithy quotes. âIf I knew then what I know now, Iâd have done things differently.â -- Patricia Dunn, former Hewlett-Packard chairwoman Sometimes you come across a product or corporate initiative -- letâs take Sonyâs recent DRM spyware as an example -- that is so patently wrongheaded you canât imagine how it ever came to see the light of day. When you dig into the history of those decisions, you often find that they were made by people who were trying, earnestly, to solve a very specific problem without seeing how their âsolutionâ might affect the company as a whole. Thatâs what makes the scandal that led to the resignation of HP Chairman Patricia Dunn and the criminal charges against her, HP legal counsel Kevin Hunsaker, and three outside investigators all the more exceptional. These were the folks at the top of the totem pole. The dispute arose over the handling of an investigation by HP to see which members of its board of directors leaked information, including arguments about the ouster of former CEO Carly Fiorina, to the press. Hurd and other board members, it seems, became distracted by a âplumbingâ expedition, as it was called in the Nixon White House, and contracted with a company to use âpretexting,â a controversial technique where investigators pretend to be the people being investigated in order to access private information. Despite intense media and legal scrutiny, though, the squabble has not fazed HP shareholders or customers. Under Mark Hurd, CEO and newly appointed chairman, the company is fulfilling the promise of the controversial HP-Compaq merger engineered by Fiorina: It has overtaken Dell as the leading PC maker and IBM as the biggest IT company. The spy scandal has broad implications, however. Congress is now considering federal laws against pretexting, and increased oversight of corporate governance is becoming a shareholder rallying cry. --Marc Ferranti, IDG News Service ââFree has to have a price?â Thatâs nonsense.â -- Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz After years of staving off open source proponents, Sun Microsystems in November 2006 bit the bullet and made Java available via open source, and doubled down on that by offering up Java to the GNU General Public License, ensuring that revisions to Java are submitted back to the community at large. Naturally, the move raised as many questions as it answered. Chief among them: Can Sunâs Java gurus adapt to the new paradigm and relinquish some degree of control? Looking at the evidence, it seems likely that Sun can. Java already has spawned a whole industryâs worth of open source projects such as the popular Spring Framework. Sunâs Solaris OS has thrived under open source. Inside Sun, however, not everyone shared Schwartzâs optimism. Graham Hamilton, a Sun Fellow for the Java team, departed the company over the momentous announcement, according to one insider. Outside Sun, IBM protested that it wanted Java placed under the jurisdiction of the Apache Software Foundation. Schwartzâs decision regarding Java will be remembered as a high point of 2006, and further proof that commercial vendors must find a way to ride, not fight the open source wave. -- Paul Krill âI am having personal difficulty looking veterans in the eye.â -- VA CISO Pedro Cadenas With mega blow-ups like the hack of CardSystems, many labeled 2005 the âYear of the Data Breach.â But that year seemed to extend, seamlessly, into 2006, as well. No incident epitomized the bumbling of sensitive data than the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairsâ loss of a laptop containing personal data of more than 26 million vets. The device in question was stolen from the home of a VA analyst, and was later recovered. Stories like the VAâs were sadly common this year. Chevron, GE, AT&T, Starbucks, and Wells Fargo all reported losing customer or employee data. One of the common themes in many cases was that data was being carried around, unencrypted, on portable PCs stolen from or lost by employees of third-party companies. That troubling trend bears out in a study that Vontu and the Ponemon Institute conducted this year, which found that 81 percent of the 500 companies surveyed âreported the loss of one or more laptops containing sensitive information during the past 12 months.â --Ted Samson âI wouldnât be surprised to see SaaS services (at) $5 per month, per user.â -- Josh Greenbaum, EAConsult 2006 didnât quite make it as âThe Year of SaaS,â but it came darn close. Spurred by the success of firms such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAS created SaaS CRM products with integration to their on-premises software as a differentiator. Even more important: SaaS providers, led by Salesforce, laid down a solid foundation on which to build new services in 2007 and beyond. Take, for example, AppExchange, an online market of sorts that Salesforce launched in October. AppExchange allows third-party providers to post their wares, and gives users the ability to pick and choose from applications and features that enhance the Salesforce.com software. AppExchange implies a recognition by Salesforce and, we can now assume, other SaaS providers that if enterprise-level companies are to adopt SaaS, then SaaS solutions canât be siloed. Integration of CRM with ERP, business intelligence and product lifecycle management are a must for the enterprise. -- Ephraim Schwartz âthe best season to visit Italyâ -- search query by Thelma Arnold, aka AOL user No. 4417749 Connect users to the world of information â¦ then betray their trust. Itâs not exactly the long-term strategy AOL had in mind, nor one to stay on top in todayâs Web 2.0-influenced Internet. Yet AOLâs infamous search data leak in August, which resulted in the ousting of CTO Maureen Govern, was just one headline head-scratcher involving the online giant this year. AOL, with its huge user base, has a track record of developing innovative new services to keep users loyal. That should have put the company at the forefront of the Web 2.0 wave that gave birth to sites such as FaceBook. But AOL, like other âold lineâ dot-coms Yahoo and Microsoft, proved too slow on the uptake, as firms with bigger visions and faster feet cherry-picked hot properties and left them standing on the sidelines. AOL hurt itself, too, with news reports of horror stories from customers who tried to cancel accounts, and a âbadwareâ label for AOL 9.0. By the time The New York Timesâ triangulated Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow from Lilburn, Ga., from the search record of AOL user No. 4417749, it was merely putting a face on AOLâs already eroding relationship with its expansive user base. By yearâs end, firms such as AOL and Yahoo were taking bolder steps to right their listing vessels: AOL dropped its subscription-services model and a quarter of its workforce, including CEO Jonathan Miller. Yahoo also shook up its boardroom, amid disappointing earnings and signs of discontent from senior management. Shortly before he lost his job, CEO Miller had observed in a keynote speech that âthe big companies will stay big companiesâ as the Internet evolves. Going into 2007, AOL isnât alone among big companies that are praying that adage rings true. -- Jason Snyder
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A US attorney general is investigating methods used by Hewlett Packard to spy on senior members of staff.
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Does the Wal-Mart eavesdropping debale have the potential to be this year's HP scandal? A former IT security staffer for the retailer evaluates what might have happened.
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The class-action lawsuit filed against Dell Computer on Wednesday makes a complex case, and does not provide much evidence to back up some of its principal pillars other than citing Internet blogs and press reports. Intel is involved, though only peripherally. There are leaps of logic one must take to accept its premises. But whatever the case's outcome, it has already damaged Dell.