• Toronto police to buy encrypted radios

    The Toronto police will spend CAN$35 million on encrypted radios; new system may shut out public eavesdroppers — by tow-truck drivers, the media, scanning enthusiasts — starting with the June 2010 G20 summit

  • Stealth data: a new dimension in PC data protection

    Researchers at St. Poelten University of Applied Sciences develop the first viable steganographic solution for windows; data can now be protected better than ever before with the Windows operating system, without leaving the slightest trace or giving away the tiniest hint of its existence

  • FBI issues a new code breaking challenge

    The FBI posts its annual code-breaking challenge on its Web site; this is the longest code-breaking challenge to date; the FBI says that the code-breaking task is similar to work being done in its labs

  • Drone security questions raised years ago

    Questions about the security of drone communications were raised years ago; in 2004, U.S. officials raised concerns about Russia and China intercepting and manipulating video from drone aircraft, but the military believed it was facing more pressing issues; officers at the time were not concerned about communications being intercepted in Iraq or Afghanistan because they believed militants were technically unsophisticated.

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  • U.S. Army working to encrypt UAV video feeds

    The Army is scrambling to secure the live video feeds from its UAVs from being intercepted by insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan; Raven drones will be retrofitted with encryption technology as early as this month; the U.S. Air Force has known for more than a decade that the live video feeds from its unmanned aerial vehicles can be intercepted by the enemy but opted not to do anything about it until this year.

  • Pentagon says U.S. fixed drones hacked by Iraqi insurgents

    Iraqi insurgents, using a $25.95 off-the-shelf commercial application, were able to intercept communication between U.S. surveillance UAVs and the UAVs’ command center; the hacking was discovered when the U.S. military found files of intercepted drone video feeds on laptops of captured militants; U.S. soldiers discovered “days and days and hours and hours of proof,” one U.S. officer said; the same hacking technique is known to have been employed in Afghanistan; the U.S. government has known about the UAV communication flaw since the 1990s, but assumed its adversaries would not be able to take advantage of it.

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  • U.S. Army funds a new discipline: Network Science

    The U.S. Army gives Rensselaer Polytechnic in New York State $16.75 million to launch the Center for Social and Cognitive Networks; the new center will link together top social scientists, neuroscientists, and cognitive scientists with leading physicists, computer scientists, mathematicians, and engineers in the search to uncover, model, understand, and foresee the complex social interactions that take place in today’s society

  • Raytheon's insider threat solution receives federal validation

    Raytheon’s SureView product is now FIPS 1402 Level 1 complaint; validation means that Raytheon’s enterprise monitoring and investigation tools may now be used by government agencies, including the Department of Defense, to protect sensitive government data in computer and telecommunication systems

  • Growth trends in software security favor Beyond Encryption

    Irish company specializing in developing software for protecting sensitive data stands to benefit from growth trends in the global security software market; most encryption products rely on the user having to remember a password to unlock their data; the approach of Beyond Encryption is to have access controlled by an administrator so that the data is protected wherever it goes