Category Archives: Current Events
South Korean Woman Tricks Fingerprint Scanner in Japan
Back in April 2008, a South Korean woman who was banned from entering Japan for 5 years slipped through security at airports using a fake password and some special tape. The immigration control system in Japan features a state-of-the-art biometrics … Continue reading
Towards Biometric Passports
The EU recently passed a bill to introduce computerized biometric passports which will include people’s fingerprints as well as their photographs. It joined a host of other countries which have taken similar steps towards increasing the security of their … Continue reading
Current event: Downadup worm infects 1.1 million machines in 24 hours
A worm known as Downadup, or also Conficker by some security companies, is spreading rampantly by exploiting a bug found – and patched – months ago in Windows machines. F-Secure believes that the worm has already compromised 35 million machines … Continue reading
Current Event: Security Vulnerability in Safari RSS
According to the open source programmer Brian Mastenbrook, he has found a security flaw in Safari Rss feeds. He said that Apple’s Safari browser is vulnerable to an attack that allows a malicious web site to read files on a … Continue reading
Storm worm cracked, but defenses may not fly
The Storm worm, noticed for the first time on January 17th, 2007, is one of the more notorious worms of the last few years. Targetted initially towards individual Windows machines, victims were often infected after receiving a bait e-mail with … Continue reading
Current Event: Beware, Cellphones Attacks Next
[Devy Pranowo and Xia (My) Cam] A report from the Georgia Tech Security Center predicts that botnets were likely to hit mobile phones sometime soon. Botnet <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet> can be delivered to machines through email or instant messages, which now is … Continue reading
Current Events – Undocumented Chip in Wii
“Update. This entry was updated on <January 9, 2009> to reflect a <re-interpretation of the original article>. After several years that Wii have been launch, hackers found flaws in Wii’s security aspect. According to an article from Nintendo World Report, … Continue reading
Current Event: 3 London Hospitals Infected
According to articles from BBC and TheRegister back in November of 2008, three London hospitals fell victim to the Mytob Worm. Originating from early 2005, this worm spreads itself through email and prevents removal by disabling any attempts to retrieve … Continue reading
Data Breaches Booming
InformationWeek recently published an article based on data from the Identity Theft Resource Center (a non-profit organization which aims to understand and prevent identity theft), that shows an increase of 47% in the number of reported data breaches in 2008. … Continue reading
Current Event: Lexus to begin sending messages directly to drivers
According to a recent article in USA Today, Lexus will begin including new technology to allow the company to send audio messages to the computers present in their cars. It appears to be similar to an e-mail system, where the … Continue reading