security

Those of us who grew up in the Paleolithic period remember that scene at the opening of every Mission Impossible episode--the original TV show, not the movies--when the reel-to-reel tape self-destructs after conveying that week's orders. Ever since then, we've always been fascinated with gadgets that protect themselves independently.

There's a new phone out of China that doesn't self-destruct, but it does have a special feature that will prevent it from functioning if it falls into the wrong hands. Qiao Xing Mobile Communication's T100 has fingerprint recognition technology designed to ensure that thieves don't … Read more

A Michigan man who used a coffee shop's unsecured Wi-Fi to check his e-mail from his car could have faced up to five years in prison, according to local TV station WOOD. But it seems few in the village of Sparta, Mich., were aware that using an unsecured Wi-Fi connection without the owner's permission--a practice known as piggybacking--was a felony.

Each day around lunch time, Sam Peterson would drive to the Union Street Cafe, park his car and--without actually entering the coffee shop--check his e-mail and surf the Net. His ritual raised the suspicions of Police Chief Andrew … Read more

Every large Internet company has an online security team in place, and Google is no different. Now the search engine giant is going public. Yesterday, Google launched its new online security blog. The blog will post news on its little-known antimalware team, which, it turns out, has been in existence for about a year.

In its initial post, Google clarifies its now-famous one-in-10-Web-sites-are-malicious statement, derived from a presentation Niels Provos, Dean McNamee, Panayiotis Mavrommatis, Ke Wang, and Nagendra Modadugu gave at last month's Hotbots 2007. Provos says the figure that is quoted in the media should be 0.1 … Read more

Just a few days ago, Opera Software was singing the blues.

It turned out that unsavory attackers could craft malicious torrent files, which, in turn, could lead to a buffer overflow in Opera for Microsoft Windows users, according to Opera's security advisory.

And that's not a good thing.

These attackers could inject arbitrary code into users' systems, if they right clicked on a torrent entry in the transfer manager, resulting in a buffer overflow. Fortunately, for some, simply clicking on a torrent link would not trigger the vulnerability.

Opera, which was notified of the flaw on May 8 … Read more

Warning: disturbing a war memorial can provoke all out cyber war--at least in Estonia. On April 27, 2007, Estonia officials relocated the "Bronze Soldier," a Soviet-era war memorial commemorating an unknown Russian who died fighting the Nazis, a move that incited rioting by ethnic Russians and the blockading of the Estonian Embassy in Moscow. It also started a large and sustained distributed denial-of-service attack on several Estonian Web sites, including those of government ministries and the prime minister's Reform Party. A denial-of-service attack (DoS) occurs when someone directs a large number of requests to a target URL; … Read more

It's one of the most worn-out cliches of all action movies: the laser beam alarm system. But if they've been around for so long, why they haven't become household staples in today's security-obsessed society?

The latest example comes from Arizona-based company Ionatron and its "Portal Denial System" (sounds so RoboCop). Created for the U.S. government, it fires a stream of "laser-induced plasma" across any entryway, though SCI FI Tech says the operator has the option of making it lethal or "less lethal." Come to think of it, maybe it'… Read more

There used to be a debate in the networking industry around network intelligence. One camp favored the "fast/dumb" network with extremely limited additional intelligence. The other pushed for added processing power as a way to off-load server tasks.

This theoretical dispute still lingers to some extent. There will always be networking hot-rodders like Force10 and Juniper who figure out ways to move packets faster than everyone else, but on balance the argument is moot--Moore's law tipped the scales toward the network intelligentsia.

I expect network intelligence to be the dominant theme at this week's Interop … Read more

The way the particles land on a given credit card's magnetic stripe are as unique as individual snowflakes or human fingerprints--or so says a Magtek, the company that developed, MagnePrint, which records the unique magnetic media signature for all credit and debit cards scanned through its readers. The first scan by a MagnePrint reader creates a template against which all subsequent scans are compared.

MagnePrint is designed to prevent "skimming." Online carders buy credit-card information from a black-market database, then copy that information onto a blank physical card using a machine that costs about $250. The skimmed … Read more

Austin, Tex. Who does Richard Gephardt, the former Speaker of the House, look like to you?

A weatherman or a congressman in a movie, Gephardt said during a lunchtime speech at the Clean Energy Venture Forum taking place in Austin, Texas this week. Two women stopped him in an airport a while ago and one thought he was a weatherman from CNN. Another thought he was either a congressman or someone that played a congressman in a movie.

R. James Woolsey, the former director of the CIA and now a vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton, had his own encounter … Read more