• Memphis flood fear eases, Louisiana and Mississippi brace for worst

    Residents living near the Mississippi River have been battling a record surge of water that is slowly making its way south sending a deluge of water beyond the river’s banks and into nearby communities; on Tuesday, the river’s crest made its way through Memphis hitting near record levels of 47.8 feet; so far the levees along the river have been holding up; residents of Louisiana and Mississippi are bracing for similar record water levels as the crest winds southward; to help ease the pressure on the levee system, the Army Corps of Engineers opened up several spillways on Monday including parts of the Bonnet Carre spillway; the region has received 600 percent more rain than usual for this time of year

  • 25 million more users hit in second cyber attack on Sony

    Japanese electronics giant Sony recently announced that hackers successfully broke into its networks and stole sensitive data from more than twenty-five million online gaming subscribers; the announcement comes days after Sony’s admission that seventy-seven million users had their personal information stolen; in the most recent attack, hackers infiltrated Sony’s Online Entertainment network and stole names, addresses, emails, birth dates, and even phone numbers from online gamers; some analysts estimate that the attacks could cost Sony and credit card companies as much as $1 to $2 billion

  • Hackers crack Nikon's image verification system

    A cyber security firm recently announced that it had successfully hacked Nikon’s image verification system that protects digital photos; ElcomSoft, a cyber security firm, says that its hackers have successfully replicated the electronic signature code from Nikon images allowing it to manipulate photos that still pass authentication tests; Nikon’s Image Authentication System is aimed at verifying digital images to ensure that they have not been tampered with especially when used in forensics, accident reports, or construction documentation; ElcomSoft says that its goal was to raise awareness about the security vulnerability and the company has alerted Nikon to the weaknesses of its system

  • DOJ report finds FBI agents lacks critical cyber security skills

    A recent government report found that the FBI’s cybersecurity experts are incompetent and overly focused on investigating child pornography; the study, conducted by the Department of Justice (DOJ), said that many of the FBI agents trained in cyber security lacked the ability to investigate national security related intrusions and threats; out of the thirty-six agents interviewed, only 64 percent said they had the expertise to handle national security related cyber investigations; the remaining 36 percent “lacked the networking and counterintelligence expertise to investigate national security intrusion cases” ; five agents even admitted that they “did not think they were able or qualified to investigate national security intrusions effectively”

  • Preparing your organization for Stuxnet-like attack

    A cybersecurity expert describes Stuxnet as “this epochal change”; he says that although Stuxnet was of such complexity and required such significant resources to develop that few attackers will be in a position to produce a similar threat in the near future, we now know that the dangers of Stuxnet-like threats are no longer theoretical

  • Strikeout! Yankees release ticket holders' personal data

    Apple and Google, Sony and Microsoft have all made news with security failures in the last weeks; the venerable New York Yankees baseball franchise now joins that list with the release of personal information of half of their season-ticket holders; this is but the latest example of cyber vulnerability owing to human fallibility

  • U.S. reducing number of data centers, moving to the cloud

    The U.S. government operates 2,100 data centers; these centers, together, occupy more than 350,000 square feet; to cut cost and increase security, the government plans to close 137 of the centers by the end of the year, part of a broader plan to close 800 data center within the next five years; in addition, 100 e-mail systems serving about one million government employees will be moved to the cloud

  • Sony's gaming network hacked, Microsoft's follows suit

    Gamers are in a frenzy over Sony’s announcement that its PlayStation network security had been breached, resulting in the exposure of a large amount of each user’s personal and financial information; the first of an expected flood of lawsuits, as well as class action is filed in U.S. District Court; Microsoft announces an exploited vulnerability in one of their game titles leading to phishing attempts, and acknowledged that previously banned “modded” consoles were attaching to the network again

  • Ceelox unveils fingerprint authentication for cloud networks

    Ceelox, Inc. recently announced the release of Ceelox ID Online which is a biometric solution designed specifically for cloud computing applications; users can now use their fingerprints to securely authenticate their credentials, minimizing the threat of having their user name and password stolen or compromised; stolen passwords and online identity theft has risen dramatically in recent years; from mid-2005 to mid-2006 alone, roughly fifteen million Americans were the victims of fraud related to identity theft; with Ceelox ID, users also have the flexibility to use one password for all their accounts to increase flexibility and convenience, while maintaining security

  • Google joins Apple in privacy furor

    iPhones transmit locations back to Apple, and Apple is not alone in this activity; Google has disclosed that its Android cell phones have been transmitting location data for some time; members of the Congress and Senate have begun to demand answers and explanations

  • Cell phone privacy

    Apple faces questions about an undisclosed, hidden geographical tracking file in its 3G products; the existence of the system was included in an operating system update downloaded and installed by users; a free mapping program can be downloaded to view your own history

  • Dramatic increase in critical infrastructure cyber attacks, sabotage

    A new study by McAfee and CSIS reveals a dramatic increase in cyber attacks on critical infrastructure such as power grids, oil, gas, and water; the study also shows that that many of the world’s critical infrastructures lacked protection of their computer networks, and revealed the staggering cost and impact of cyberattacks on these networks

  • Government plan for consolidated online ID unveiled

    Last Friday President Obama unveiled a plan to establish federal standards to create consolidated secure online passwords; the ultimate goal of National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) is to create a more secure environment for online transactions where users only have to register once and can use a common password for multiple sites; NSTIC lays out the industry standards and technology policies around the new authentication methods but leaves the development and deployment of the technology entirely in the hands of the private sector to avoid the establishment of a government-led national ID; privacy advocates worry that it could create an environment where authentication is increasingly required

  • Weak passwords get robust protection

    The combination of simple codes and Captchas, which are even more encrypted using a chaotic process, produces effective password protection; the passwords of the future could become more secure and, at the same time, simpler to use; researchers have been inspired by the physics of critical phenomena in their effort significantly to improve password protection; the researchers split a password into two sections; with the first, easy to memorize section they encrypt a Captcha — an image that computer programs per se have difficulty in deciphering; the researchers also make it more difficult for computers, the task of which it is automatically to crack passwords, to read the passwords without authorization; they use images of a simulated physical system, which they additionally make unrecognizable with a chaotic process; these p-Captchas allowed the researchers to achieve a high level of password protection, even though the user need only remember a weak password

  • Firm pushes for open wireless sensor data

    As wireless sensors are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in electrical grids, homes, and businesses, electronic enthusiasts and programmers believe that this data could be used to create a host of new devices with practical uses; making sensor data freely available allows engineers to build software and apps that monitor data in real time for things like local radiation levels, water quality, or even your home’s energy consumption; leading the push for open sensor data is U.K. based Pachube (pronounced “patchbay”) which has developed a network of sensors that collect six million points of data per day; the majority of sensor information is currently encrypted and therefore inaccessible