• U.S. Navy's PANDA technology to detect "deviant" ships

    There are tens of thousands of ships on the high seas every day, carrying millions of containers, entering and leaving hundreds of ports in dozens of countries; monitoring this vast amount of traffic to make sure that none of the containers is carrying WMDs is humanly impossible; Lockheed Martin has developed the PANDA Maritime Domain Awareness program to help the U.S. Navy and intelligence community keep a closer eye on the global maritime traffic

  • JASON says computer models cannot predict terrorist events

    Pentagon advisory panel concludes that extreme terrorist events such as the 9/11 attacks cannot be predicted by computer models because the data re too sparse; “it is simply not possible to validate (evaluate) predictive models of rare events that have not occurred, and unvalidated models cannot be relied upon”

  • The brief

    Vetting a chip with a hidden agenda is not easy, and chip makers cannot afford to test every chip; also, today only Intel and a few other companies still design and manufacture all their own chips in their own fabrication plants; other chip designers — including LSI Corp. and, most recently, Sony — have gone “fabless,” outsourcing their manufacturing to off-shore facilities known as foundries

  • Counterfeit chips may hobble advanced weapons

    While most computer security efforts have until now been focused on software, tampering with hardware circuitry may ultimately be an equally dangerous threat; the Pentagon now manufactures in secure facilities run by American companies only about 2 percent of the more than $3.5 billion of integrated circuits bought annually for use in military gear

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  • Vulnerability identified in Amazon's cloud computing

    Researchers show that it is possible to find would-be victims within cloud hardware; cloud technologies use virtual machines — remote versions of traditional onsite computer systems; the number of these virtual machines can be expanded or contracted on the fly to meet demand, creating tremendous efficiencies — but the actual computing is performed within one or more physical data centers, creating troubling vulnerabilities

  • Computer models predicts power outages during hurricanes

    Researchers develop computer model that can estimate how many power outages will occur across a region as a hurricane is approaching; having accurate estimates, prior to the storm’s arrival, of how many outages will exist and where they will occur, will allow utilities to better plan their crew requests and crew locations

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  • Robust hierarchical metropolitan quantum cryptography network

    The security of a majority of classical cryptography is based on the complexity of the cipher algorithms and the development of distributed computing and specific hacking chips; this may no longer be sufficient, as quantum computing has become a serious threat to classical cryptography; the solution: quantum encryption

  • Growing demand for IT forensics experts

    As reliance on the Internet increases, so do Internet-related crimes; the growing need to investigate such crimes and find out the culprits and their methods has increased demand for IT forensics experts

  • It's the people, stupid

    People are still the weakest link in computer and Internet security, study finds

  • MIT researchers develop powerful object recognition system

    The new object recognition system could allow computers in the future automatically to search through hours of video footage for a particular two-minute scene; intelligence analysts should be happy

  • Michigan airport turns off Web site over malware risk

    The Gerald R. Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids temporarily pulled its site in response to an unspecified malware threat

  • Denying denial-of-service attacks

    Denial of Service (DoS) and distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks involve an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users; new filtering system could protect networks from such attacks

  • Oracle updates Agile PLM for food and beverage compliance

    Oracle offers a solution for the food and beverage industry, helping companies cope with ever-more-demanding regulatory requirements and product complexity

  • Improving home computer security

    Researchers have developed a specification for security policy on home networks that can guarantee reliability and availability; the specification also takes into account authentication, authorization, security policy deployment so that all users in the home are not only protected from malware but also can help ensure everyone can use the network when they need to

  • Malware lingers on for months on infected PCs

    New study says that if computer systems are not disinfected quickly after infection, then infection tends to linger around indefinitely, possibly until the point users exchange compromised boxes for new machines