Author Archives: conrad

How malware peddlers trick users into enabling MS-Office Word macros

“One popular social engineering trick to entice users to enable macros, is to make the user believe that the document contains secret or confidential information, and that the user needs to take action to reveal this information,” Didier Stevens explained. … Continue reading

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MIT algorithm emulates human intuition in big data analysis

Max Kanter, who created the algorithm as part of his master’s thesis at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), entered the algorithm into three major big data competitions. In a paper to be presented this week at IEEE International Conference … Continue reading

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Online Dating Made This Woman a Pawn in a Global Crime Plot

According to the Internet Crime Complaint Center, American victims of online romance scams lost more than $87 million in 2014 (compared with just $50 million in 2011). The intimate details of one woman’s foray into an online relationship that resulted … Continue reading

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If you counted all the bits in one petabyte at one bit per second, it would take 285 million years.

nuff said!  it’s all about the data! http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/What-does-a-petabyte-look-like

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Employees are the biggest threat to network security

“The days when firewalls, data backup and antivirus programs provided sufficient protection are over” according to Corey Steele, network security engineer for local voice and data network solutions provider High Point Networks. “A network that’s protected just by a firewall, … Continue reading

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Next-Generation Cybersecurity Is All About Behavior Recognition

Rather than focusing on stopping cybercriminals with walls, new technologies are emerging that work to identify cybercriminals instead. For example, BioCatch technology works to identify patterns of user behavior in certain applications, creating user profiles that can then be matched … Continue reading

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“I love technology but I’m not in love with technology. The human hunch is priceless.”

A recent survey of government cybersecurity professionals found that 86 percent of respondents believe big data analytics could help improve cybersecurity, but only 28 percent are currently fully leveraging big data for security purposes. Amir Orad built his career at … Continue reading

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Hacker remotely crashes Jeep from 10 miles away

“All they have to do is work out the car’s IP address and know how to break into its systems and they can take control ” In his disturbing account Greenberg described how the air vents started blasting out cold … Continue reading

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iOS flaw tricks you into giving up your iCloud password

Successful hack attacks often happen not because of tricky coding, but plain old “social engineering” — ie, conning people. The latest version of iOS, 8.3, apparently fails to filter out potentially dangerous HTML code embedded in incoming emails. The researcher’s … Continue reading

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Quantum computing is about to overturn cybersecurity’s balance of power

“Spooky action at a distance” is how Albert Einstein described one of the key principles of quantum mechanics: entanglement.  Entanglement occurs when two particles become related such that they can coordinate their properties instantly even across a galaxy. Think of … Continue reading

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