Security

Criminals of all kinds are digging tunnels along the U.S. border at a fast and furious pace. Of every tunnel ever discovered by U.S. border patrol agents, 60 percent have been found in the last three years. Agents spot a new one every month.
“All of them have been found by accident or human intelligence,” said [...]

A group of researchers from the LGC Chemical Metrology Laboratory in the United Kingdom and the University of Oviedo, Spain, have come up with a method to detect how the proportions of isotopes in a chemical element (atoms with an equal number of protons and electrons but different numbers of neutrons) vary throughout the length [...]

Immigration officials held a cancer patient for four hours before they allowed him to enter the USA because one of his cancer drugs caused his fingerprints to disappear. His oncologist is now advising all cancer patients who are being treated with the commonly used drug, capecitabine, to carry a doctor’s letter with them if they [...]

If you own a computer, chances are you have experienced the aftermath of a nasty virus at some point. In contrast, there have been no major outbreaks of mobile phone viral infection, despite the fact that over 80 percent of Americans now use these devices. A team headed by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, director of the Center [...]

A new approach to analyzing social networks, reported in the current issue of the International Journal of Services Sciences, could help homeland security find the covert connections between the people behind terrorist attacks. The approach involves revealing the nodes that act as hubs in a terrorist network and tracing back to individual planners and perpetrators.
Dr [...]

Four tons of seeds — almost 90,000 samples of hundreds of crop species — from food crop collections maintained by Canada, Ireland, Switzerland, USA, and three international agricultural research centers in Syria, Mexico and Colombia, were delivered today to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault as it celebrated its one-year anniversary. The repository, located near the [...]

In the race to develop the next generation of storage and recording media, a major hurdle has been the difficulty of studying the tiny magnetic structures that will serve as their building blocks. Now a team of physicists at the University of California, Davis, has developed a technique to capture the magnetic “fingerprints” of certain [...]

Thanks to an ingenious new strategy devised by researchers at University of California, Davis and Intel Corporation, computer network administrators might soon be able to mount effective, low-cost defenses against self-propagating infectious programs known as worms.
Many computers are already equipped with software that can detect when another computer is attempting to attack it. Yet the [...]

Independent security researchers in California and researchers at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the Netherlands, EPFL in Switzerland, and Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) in the Netherlands have found a weakness in the Internet digital certificate infrastructure that allows attackers to forge certificates that are fully trusted by all commonly used web browsers. [...]

All U.S. agencies with counterterrorism programs that collect or “mine” personal data — such as phone, medical, and travel records or Web sites visited — should be required to systematically evaluate the programs’ effectiveness, lawfulness, and impacts on privacy, says a new report from the National Research Council. Both classified and unclassified programs should be [...]

As college students head back to school with gleaming new laptops, some will, unfortunately, see the last of their machine in a library, cafeteria or dorm room. And it’s not just college campuses that are hot spots for computer theft, or just students who are the targets. Newspapers recently reported that airports in the United [...]

A new study by researchers at North Carolina State University shows that most Internet users are unable to distinguish genuine popup warnings messages from false ones - even after repeated mistakes. The fake ones were designed to trick users into downloading harmful software.
"This study demonstrates how easy it is to fool people on the Web," [...]

In the face of technology that will soon be able not only to track an individual’s movements but predict them too, people are far too relaxed about protecting their privacy, according to social psychologist Saadi Lahlou, writing in a special issue of Social Science Information on cognitive technologies, published by SAGE.
According to Lahlou, and other [...]

The growth of shared Wi-Fi and other wireless computer networks has increased the risk of eavesdropping on Internet communications, but researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science and College of Engineering have devised a low-cost system that can thwart these "Man-in-the-Middle" (MitM) attacks.
The system, called Perspectives, also can protect against attacks related to [...]

More than 75 percent of the bank Web sites surveyed in a University of Michigan study had at least one design flaw that could make customers vulnerable to cyber thieves after their money or even their identity.
Atul Prakash, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and doctoral students Laura Falk and [...]

Shalini Kesar, a computer scientist at Southern Utah University in Cedar City, has devised an antifraud strategy for business. Writing in the International Journal of Business Information Systems from Inderscience Publishers, he suggests that managers should be made aware of security issues and send out cues to junior staff that they have this knowledge.
Combating digital [...]

New spray-on films developed by UC San Diego chemists will be the basis of portable devices that can quickly reveal trace amounts of nitrogen-based explosives.
Contaminated fingerprints leave dark shadows on the films, which glow blue under ultraviolet light. One of the films can distinguish between different classes of explosive chemicals, a property that could provide [...]

In January, Skyhook Wireless Inc. announced that Apple would use Skyhook’s Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) for its popular Map applications. The WPS database contains information on access points throughout the world. Skyhook itself provides most of the data in the database, with users contributing via direct entries to the database, and requests for localization. ETH [...]

Yong Guan had scribbled 12 arrows across his office whiteboard, each black line going from one little box he had drawn to another little box. He had written five long formulas up there, too.
And that was bad news for cyber criminals.
Guan, the Litton Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University, and [...]