Items tagged with Secret
It's not the first time a used storage device of some type has yielded sensitive information, and it won't be the last. Chris Ogle from Whangerei, NZ (pictured) got a surprise after he bought a used MP3 player from an Oklahoma thrift store for $18. Upon hooking it to his PC, he found 60 files of military information in total, including the names and personal details of American soldiers. While it's bad enough that the information was on the device in the first place, it's also hard to understand why they would be using their MP3 player to transport this information. Let's also not forget that the Pentagon banned USB drives last November, though that was over a virus. Here we have someone taking...
Read more...
It's one thing to see, say, banking information to show up on a hard drive on eBay. But to see top secret information show up on a digital camera (likely on an SD card) sold on eBay, that's a whole 'nother ball of wax.According to The Sun, an unsuspecting 28-year-old Brit spent a pretty reasonable $31 for a Nikon Coolpix camera, and got waaaaaay more than he bargained for. Not only did he get some top secret info, after he reported it to the police, he got a visit from Special Branch.Among the items on the camera --- which he noticed after he downloaded the pictures from a vacation --- were a document marked "top secret" detailing a computer system used by MI6, pictures of rockets...
Read more...
A study detailed in Nature exposes the local nature of humans: we like to hang around our homes. But that's not what caught our interest. It's the way the study was conducted.Researchers used cell phone towers to track individuals' locations whenever they made or received phone calls and text messages over six months. In a second set of records, researchers took another 206 cell phones that had tracking devices in them and got records for their locations every two hours over a week's time period.The study was based on cell phone records from a private company, whose name also was not disclosed.Study co-author Cesar Hidalgo, a physics researcher at Northeastern, said he and his colleagues didn't...
Read more...
BlackBerrys can be quite useful for staying in touch, sending media, and even sending business related files. People might want to draw the line at sensitive government data: "We're not at war with France, at least not the last time I checked, but that doesn't mean that the French want their state secrets coursing through the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure, courtesy of French government officials addicted to les BlackBerrys. Sure, BlackBerrys come with built-in encryption, but is that enough when you really, really don't want anyone to get their hands on the information you're carrying around?" While BlackBerrys do have encryption, it might not be up to the task of protecting sensitive...
Read more...
The UK's Barclays Bank is beginning to use two factor authentification for transactions online to combat fraud. They are supplying 500,000 customers with a PINsentry device that would make it imposible for a phishing scam to clean out your bank account by simply getting their hands on your log-in password. While broadly welcomed, many in the industry have been concerned at the slow introduction of two-factor authentication. "It has taken banks a while to get round to tokens because it is a cost to them," said Tony Redmond, chief technology officer at HP Services and HP Security. "Some bankers have said that this is because it is more expensive to introduce tokens...
Read more...
In order to combat crime in a world dominated by technology, the Secret Service has announced the opening of the National Computer Forensic Institute. The institute, to be built in Hoover, Alabama, is scheduled to open in 2008. The plan is to turn out about 900 computer forensic law enforcement officers each year. High-tech training is increasingly important for police officers, detectives, and federal agents as crime continues its migration onto the electronic byways of the Internet. Unfortunately, the level of training offered to law enforcement is "diverse," as the Secret Service delicately puts it. To better educate US crime fighters, the Service has announced the creation of the National...
Read more...
An interesting video dissecting portions of Job's iPhone introduction at Macworld '07 has surfaced. "While none of this is really groundbreaking information, some of it does further explain how the iPhone functions and even hints at possible future strategies Apple may be taking." Sadly, that statement sums the video up fairly well. If you're very interested in the iPhone, then by all means take a look. It would seem that the narrator found the word "secret" in the same dictionary that Alanis Morissette found "ironic" in....
Read more...
Phishing scams are all the rage these days. And as the scammers get more sophisticated, it's not just noobs who get their info and their money stolen. E*Bay's subsidiary PayPal is preparing to offer a key fob for its users to make stealing your info only half the battle. PayPal's use of key fobs represents what is called two-factor authentication, a login system in which an additional form of device-oriented verification is used in addition to a conventional password. Two-factor authentication is advantageous because it prevents a user's account from being stolen when one of the two authentication forms is compromised....
Read more...
By now you all know that Intel's Core 2 Duo "Conroe" processors are on the horizon, and that they've been performing very well. According to The Inquirer AMD has incorporated some new technology in their AM2 platform that will give them a big boost in performance in some circumstances. "THE LAUNCH OF Intel Conroe is scheduled to go on July 23rd, when partners will start rolling out the new products. The NDA for reviews is scheduled to expire around July 28th. However, AMD has a counter-attack weapon hidden in its Socket AM2 infrastructure. It seems that all AM2 CPUs were outfitted with a support for Reverse-HyperThreading,...
Read more...
