• Pentagon says U.S. fixed drones hacked by Iraqi insurgents

    Iraqi insurgents, using a $25.95 off-the-shelf commercial application, were able to intercept communication between U.S. surveillance UAVs and the UAVs’ command center; the hacking was discovered when the U.S. military found files of intercepted drone video feeds on laptops of captured militants; U.S. soldiers discovered “days and days and hours and hours of proof,” one U.S. officer said; the same hacking technique is known to have been employed in Afghanistan; the U.S. government has known about the UAV communication flaw since the 1990s, but assumed its adversaries would not be able to take advantage of it.

  • U.S. Army funds a new discipline: Network Science

    The U.S. Army gives Rensselaer Polytechnic in New York State $16.75 million to launch the Center for Social and Cognitive Networks; the new center will link together top social scientists, neuroscientists, and cognitive scientists with leading physicists, computer scientists, mathematicians, and engineers in the search to uncover, model, understand, and foresee the complex social interactions that take place in today’s society

  • Raytheon's insider threat solution receives federal validation

    Raytheon’s SureView product is now FIPS 1402 Level 1 complaint; validation means that Raytheon’s enterprise monitoring and investigation tools may now be used by government agencies, including the Department of Defense, to protect sensitive government data in computer and telecommunication systems

  • Growth trends in software security favor Beyond Encryption

    Irish company specializing in developing software for protecting sensitive data stands to benefit from growth trends in the global security software market; most encryption products rely on the user having to remember a password to unlock their data; the approach of Beyond Encryption is to have access controlled by an administrator so that the data is protected wherever it goes