Security

Last week, The New York Times revealed that the Obama administration had prepared a cyberattack plan to be carried out against Iran in the event diplomatic negotiations failed to limit that country’s nuclear weapons development. The plan, code-named Nitro Zeus, was said to be capable of disabling Iran’s air defenses, communications system and parts of…

Two years ago this month, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released a document designed to help strengthen cybersecurity at organizations that manage critical national infrastructure, such as banking and the energy supply. Produced after a year of intensive collaboration with industry, the Cybersecurity Framework is now a tool used by a wide…

ARMONK, NY — IBM unveiled a new mainframe, bringing the security of data encryption without slowing down system performance to mid-sized organizations. The new system, IBM z13s, is enabled and optimized for hybrid cloud environments and can help secure critical information and transactions better than before. IBM also announced new security partnerships and highly integrated…

Offering a glimpse of an important part of computer history, the new Malware Museum is an online collection featuring emulated versions of MS-DOS viruses from a simpler time. Assembled by Mikko Hermanni Hyppönen, the chief resource officer at Finnish security firm F-secure, the programs can be found on the non-profit Internet Archive, which is dedicated to…

Researchers at MIT and Texas Instruments have developed a new type of radio frequency identification (RFID) chip that is virtually impossible to hack. If such chips were widely adopted, it could mean that an identity thief couldn’t steal your credit card number or key card information by sitting next to you at a café, and…

Here they are ― the 10 most-visited stories from the past week. New formal methods for software development, a novel toolkit for computational bio-design and an international computational sustainability network; an animation of a tropical cyclone unfolding; green, dirt-cheap storage for life sciences; energy-time entanglement’s vulnerability to attack; 5 supercomputing predictions for 2016; why you’ll…

A system using images and a one-time numerical code could provide a secure and easy-to-use alternative to multi-factor methods dependent on hardware or software and one-time passwords, a study by Plymouth University suggests. Researchers from the Centre for Security Communication and Network Research (CSCAN) believe their new multi-level authentication system GOTPass could be effective in…

Physical attacks on devices connected to the Internet can be detected by analyzing WiFi signals, computer scientists have discovered. Wireless devices are increasingly used for critical roles, such as security systems or industrial plant automation. Although wireless transmissions can be encrypted to protect transmitted data, it is hard to determine if a device — such…

Engineers have developed encryption technologies for practical applications to protect microdevices from hacker attacks conducted by quantum computers. The Hardware Security Group at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) is currently working towards protecting the data against threats of tomorrow with the devices available today, the science magazine Rubin reports. Devices with a long service life have…

How do cybersecurity experts discover how to properly defend a system or build a network that’s secure? As in other domains of science, this process involves hypothesis, experimentation and analysis — or at least it should. In reality, cybersecurity research can happen in an ad hoc fashion, often in crisis mode in the wake of…

NASA has a long history of transferring technologies from their original mission applications to secondary uses. For example, “Mars continues to be a rich destination for scientific discovery and exploration, and NASA’s missions there have inspired a variety of practical, terrestrial benefits,” NASA states on its NASA Spinoff YouTube page, which features “stories about some…

Five must-read stories from the past week include the first in a series of the sharpest views of Pluto; a Turing test in the form of an online game; a new, untraceable text-messaging system; the world’s first mathematical theory of humor; and an 18-year-old student who won $400,000 for his video explaining Einstein’s Special Theory…

This is a snapshot listing the system requirements and a few of the highlighted features for the McAfee Personal Safety丨Family Locator App mentioned in “Smart Personal Safety and Security.” It also complements “The Gift of Fear,” which discusses how to recognize potentially dangerous situations. From McAfee Innovations in Santa Clara, CA, is a free personal…

This is a snapshot listing the system requirements and a few of the highlighted features for the Watch Over Me App mentioned in “Smart Personal Safety and Security.” It also complements “The Gift of Fear,” which discusses how to recognize potentially dangerous situations. From WATCH OVER ME is another free security app available for both…

This is a snapshot listing the system requirements and a few of the highlighted features for the Safe Personal Safety App mentioned in “Smart Personal Safety and Security.” It also complements “The Gift of Fear,” which discusses how to recognize potentially dangerous situations. A product of Bipper, located in Palo Alto, CA, this app currently…

Anonymity networks, which sit on top of the public Internet, are designed to conceal people’s Web-browsing habits from prying eyes. The most popular of these, Tor, has been around for more than a decade and is used by millions of people every day. Recent research, however, has shown that adversaries can infer a great deal…

HOPKINTON, MA — EMC has announced the immediate availability of a broad range of products and solutions designed to seamlessly connect primary storage and data protection systems to private and public clouds. As a result, organizations will be better equipped to take advantage of both the agility and unlimited scalability of public cloud services and…

Researchers from the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) at the National University of Singapore and the University of Seville in Spain have reported the most extreme ‘entanglement’ between pairs of photons ever seen in the lab. The result was published October 30, 2015, in Physical Review Letters. The achievement is evidence for the validity of…

BOSTON (AP) — Moshe Kai Cavalin has two university degrees, but he’s too young to vote. He flies airplanes, but he’s too young to drive a car alone. Life is filled with contrasts for Cavalin, a 17-year-old from San Gabriel, CA, who has dashed by major milestones as his age seems to lag behind. He…

Sharing genomic information among researchers is critical to the advance of biomedical research. Yet genomic data contains identifiable information and, in the wrong hands, poses a risk to individual privacy. If someone had access to your genome sequence — either directly from your saliva or other tissues, or from a popular genomic information service —…

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate is set to pass a bill aimed at improving cybersecurity by encouraging the sharing of threat information among companies and the U.S. government. A procedural vote of 83-14 on October 22, 2015, represented a healthy endorsement of a bill opposed by companies such as Apple and Dropbox, who said it…

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has long supported cybersecurity research to protect the frontiers of cyberspace. NSF investments in basic research have resulted in innovative ways to secure information and ensure privacy on the Internet and have led to algorithms that form the basis for electronic commerce, software security bug detection, spam filtering and much…

The promise of big data lies in researchers’ ability to mine massive datasets for insights that can save lives, improve services and inform our understanding of the world. These data may be generated by surfing the Web, interacting with medical devices or passing sensors. Some data may be trivial, but in many cases, data are…

Researchers have developed software using two new techniques to help computer chip designers improve memory systems. The techniques rely on “performance cloning,” which can assess the behavior of software without compromising privileged data or proprietary computer code. Computer chip manufacturers try to design their chips to provide the best possible performance. But to find the…