Category Archives: Current Events

Here are RFID Debit Cards, whether you wanted them or not.

In the world of banking, attention has turned to the prospect of using RFID technology for contactless transactions via bank cards.  While this in of itself is a security concern, John Leyden brought to light in his article (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/27/paywave/) that … Continue reading

Posted in Current Events | 7 Comments

Logic Bomb Fails to Cripple Medco’s Systems

In a recent article on Computerworld, it was reported that a former system administrator of Medco planted a logic bomb which was intended to cripple the company’s network. Medco deals with prescribing drugs and various other heath services. Due to … Continue reading

Posted in Current Events, Ethics, Policy | 2 Comments

Pillaged MySpace Photos Show Up in BitTorrent Download

More than half of the million images that are private photos of MySpace users was stolen and uploaded onto BitTorrent. This is a huge privacy breach to MySpace users. The hacker, “DMaul”, said that he learned the security hole from … Continue reading

Posted in Availability, Current Events, Privacy | 5 Comments

Alledged Skype Surveillance by German Police

Documents posted today on WikiLeaks suggest that German police in Bavaria may have used a trojan for intercepting Skype calls as part of their surveillance of suspects. One document is an offer from DigiTask, a German company, to rent Skype … Continue reading

Posted in Current Events, Privacy | 4 Comments

DoS attacks and International Tension

Last May during a protested movement of a World War II soviet statue, Estonian governmental and political sites were flooded in a series of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. These attacks consisted of hammering the sites servers with requests till … Continue reading

Posted in Availability, Current Events | 2 Comments

$7.1 billion loss at major European Bank due to fraud

I haven’t been able to thoroughly analyze this situation, but it seemed like something particularly germane to this blog (so I decided to post it with brief commentary). Basically, the French bank Société Générale (SocGen) recently revealed that single rogue … Continue reading

Posted in Current Events | 3 Comments

Maryland abandons e-voting machines for paper ballots

The state of Maryland has decided, after spending $65 million on electronic voting machines made by Premier (formerly known as Diebold) Election Systems, to spend another $20 million on optical-scan machines that read paper ballots. The reason for this incredible … Continue reading

Posted in Current Events, Integrity, Physical Security, Policy | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Comodo Launches Memory Firewall

Dark Reading reports that Comodo, an security interest group / company has developed and released a memory firewall, purported to block 90% of all buffer overflow attacks, as well as several other common attack vehicles. Comodo also markets several products, … Continue reading

Posted in Current Events | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Say goodbye to saying ‘Hello’

Microsoft has filed a patent application for a monitoring system that collects data such as heart rate, respiration rate, body temperature, and brain signals and interprets this into the worker’s stress, frustration and productivity levels. Microsoft claims that it will … Continue reading

Posted in Current Events, Ethics, Privacy | Tagged , | 2 Comments

SQL injection insecurities: RIAA

As I was reading Digg early this morning, I stumbled upon this story that many SQL injection opportunities were uncovered by people hoping to defame the site. Through a simple query to drop entries or the tables themselves, the database … Continue reading

Posted in Current Events, Integrity | Comments Off on SQL injection insecurities: RIAA