Lifeboat Foundation

Almost every day, news headlines announce another security breach and the theft of credit card numbers and other personal information. While having one’s credit card stolen can be annoying and unsettling, a far more significant, yet less recognized, concern is the security of physical infrastructure, including energy systems.

“With a credit card theft, you might have to pay $50 and get a new credit card,” says Stuart Madnick, the John Norris Maguire Professor of Information Technologies at the Sloan School of Management, a professor of engineering systems at the School of Engineering, and founding director of the Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan consortium. “But with infrastructure attacks, real physical damage can occur, and recovery can take weeks or months.”

A few examples demonstrate the threat. In 2008, an alleged cyberattack blew up an oil pipeline in Turkey, shutting it down for three weeks; in 2009, the malicious Stuxnet computer worm destroyed hundreds of Iranian centrifuges, disrupting that country’s nuclear fuel enrichment program; and in 2015, an attack brought down a section of the Ukrainian power grid—for just six hours, but substations on the grid had to be operated manually for months.

Continue reading “Protecting our energy infrastructure from cyberattack” »

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) cyber security researchers have developed a new attack called Malboard evades several detection products that are intended to continuously verify the user’s identity based on personalized keystroke characteristics.

The new paper, “Malboard: A Novel User Keystroke Impersonation Attack and Trusted Detection Framework Based on Side-Channel Analysis,” published in the Computer and Security journal, reveals a sophisticated attack in which a compromised USB keyboard automatically generates and sends malicious keystrokes that mimic the attacked user’s behavioral characteristics.

Keystrokes generated maliciously do not typically match human typing and can easily be detected. Using artificial intelligence, however, the Malboard attack autonomously generates commands in the user’s style, injects the keystrokes as malicious software into the keyboard and evades detection. The keyboards used in the research were products by Microsoft, Lenovo and Dell.

Continue reading “New computer attack mimics user’s keystroke characteristics and evades detection” »

Low tech sometimes is really good because when systems can be exploited then basically you see that no tech is sometimes best.

Election Systems & Software has championed electronic voting machines in the US. Now it has had a change of heart about the need for paper records of votes.

Cyber threats: Over half a million electronic machines are used in big US elections. Many produce paper copies of votes that can be used to audit electronic results, but some don’t. That’s a problem because security experts have shown that machines can be hacked.

Continue reading “A big US maker of paperless voting systems now says paper is essential” »

The latest case of cyberweapons escaping American control raises questions about the United States’ expensive and dangerous digital arsenal.

WhatsApp has admitted to a major cybersecurity breach that has enabled both iPhone and Android devices to be targeted with spyware from Israel’s NSO. This is a major breach for WhatsApp, with the product’s encrypted voice calls seen as a secure alternative to standard calls.

Dehgan hopes that the organization’s prizes and other initiatives will bring innovative solutions to conservation’s deepest problems. Hundreds of people have already been lured in through challenges and engineering programmes such as Make for the Planet — a multi-day, in-person event — and an online tech collaboration platform called Digital Makerspace, which matches conservationists with technical talent.

Standard efforts have failed to slow the pace of extinctions, so Conservation X Labs is trying a fresh approach.

Somebody lend Baltimore $6.

Google automatically suspended accounts after detecting they were from same network.

Governments are becoming ever more reliant on digital technology, making them more vulnerable to cyber attacks. In 2007, Estonia was attacked by pro-Russian hackers who crippled government servers, causing havoc. Cyber attacks in Ukraine targeted the country’s electricity grid, while Iran’s nuclear power plants were infected by malware that could have led to a nuclear meltdown.

In the US, president Trump recently declared a “national emergency” to recognise the threat to US computer networks from “foreign adversaries”.

Politically-motivated cyber attacks are becoming increasingly commonplace but unlike traditional warfare between two or more states, cyberwarfare can be launched by groups of individuals. On occasion, the state is actually caught in the crosshairs of competing hacking groups.

Continue reading “Cyber attacks are rewriting the ‘rules’ of modern warfare—and we aren’t prepared for the consequences” »

DARPA has awarded funding to six organizations to support the Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N) program, first announced in March 2018. Battelle Memorial Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Rice University, and Teledyne Scientific are leading multidisciplinary teams to develop high-resolution, bidirectional brain-machine interfaces for use by able-bodied service members. These wearable interfaces could ultimately enable diverse national security applications such as control of active cyber defense systems and swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles, or teaming with computer systems to multitask during complex missions.

“DARPA is preparing for a future in which a combination of unmanned systems, artificial intelligence, and cyber operations may cause conflicts to play out on timelines that are too short for humans to effectively manage with current technology alone,” said Al Emondi, the N program manager. “By creating a more accessible brain-machine interface that doesn’t require surgery to use, DARPA could deliver tools that allow mission commanders to remain meaningfully involved in dynamic operations that unfold at rapid speed.”

Over the past 18 years, DARPA has demonstrated increasingly sophisticated neurotechnologies that rely on surgically implanted electrodes to interface with the central or peripheral nervous systems. The agency has demonstrated achievements such as neural control of prosthetic limbs and restoration of the sense of touch to the users of those limbs, relief of otherwise intractable neuropsychiatric illnesses such as depression, and improvement of memory formation and recall. Due to the inherent risks of surgery, these technologies have so far been limited to use by volunteers with clinical need.