Category Archives: Current Events
Current Event: WarCloning Passport RFID Tags
According to Slashdot, researcher Chris Paget was able to capture many identification numbers from the new passports containing RFID tags while driving around San Francisco. Using $250 of equipment (a RFID reader and an antenna) hooked up to his laptop, … Continue reading
Current Event: The Internet Is Unsafe
The BBC reports that a group of experts at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland met to discuss the increasing pervasiveness of organized cybercrime and cyber warfare. One expert claimed that the past year saw more malicious internet activity … Continue reading
Wikipedia Editing Could Be Made More Restrictive Due to Vandalism
According to this article, the English version of Wikipedia may be implementing a system called “flagged revisions” to the editing software, which would require that edits would have to be approved (“flagged”) by a “trusted” user (see the Wikipedia page … Continue reading
Security Professional Works as Botmaster
Security Professional John Schiefer has continued to work in the computer security field for 15 months while he has been waiting to be sentenced for being a botmaster of a 250,000 bot herd (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/23/botmaster_sentencing_kerfuffle/). This Los Angeles based security consultant … Continue reading
Current Events: President Obama (‘s Web Site) Under Attack!
Barack Obama’s online community, which began during the 2008 campaign as a way to bring people into the political process, has been the target of recent attacks, according to an article in PCWorld. The site (login required) allows registered users … Continue reading
Ex-Fannie Mae worker charged with planting computer virus
According to the D.C. Examiner, a virus, allegedly planted by an ex-employee, was recently discovered among Fannie Mae’s 4,000 computer servers. The virus would have first disabled the companies’ computer monitoring systems, then restricted all employee access, begin erasing all … Continue reading
iTrojan
It turns out Macs can catch something. Apple’s most recent version of iWork, the counterpart of Microsoft Office, contains a Trojan. Well, almost. The pirated version that you can download from places such as The Pirate Bay is the one … Continue reading
Current events: Sony Ericsson a victim of its own employee
Issues of stealing physical or intellectual property (physically or electronically) in the context of a malicious company insider are closely interrelated, as some common prevention mechanisms can be adopted for both. According to the recent article by Mikael Ricknas, cell … Continue reading
Absent student forfeits raffle
Here at the University of Washington CSE Department we often have events called Tech Talks, where guest companies come in and give a demonstration of their technologies and expertise. Last night we had a tech talk given by Palantir Technologies, a very promising-looking company that aims to transform the way people work with large data sets by making it easier to discover and visualizing trends and connections in the ever-accumulating mountains of data generated by our modern technological culture. And at the end of the evening they planned to raffle off an iPod touch. Continue reading
Current Event: Government plans massive internet backbone security upgrade
The U.S. Federal government is planning to spend millions of dollars upgrading the backbone of the internet’s routing system. Specifically the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is planning to quadruple its budget for improvements (from $600,000 to $2.5 million per … Continue reading