Writing in Motherboard, a section of Vice.com, Victoria Turk reported on The Cyber Security Challenge UK, through which government and corporate organizations have created an online gaming platform designed to identify players with skills necessary for careers in cybersecurity. The platform functions as a “gamified job application” that can help…
President Obama has once again designated October as “Cybersecurity Awareness Month,” which, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s website, is “designed to engage and educate public and private sector partners through events and initiatives with the goal of raising awareness about cybersecurity and increasing the resiliency of the nation…
Cybersecurity was a major point of discussion during a summit between President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping, with the U.S. leader calling on his counterpart to curtail government-sponsored cyberattacks on American organizations. As reported in the Guardian, President Obama announced in a speech that he “did indicate to President…
In the article, “Intelligence Start-Up Goes Behind Enemy Lines to Get Ahead of Hackers,” Nicole Perlroth of the New York Times described the work of iSight Partners, a company that “provides intelligence about threats to computer security in much the same way military scouts provide intelligence about enemy troops.” She…
In hearings last week, the House Intelligence Committee heard testimony from several government officials—including heads of the FBI, CIA, and National Security Agency—who argued that the Government needed to maintain “backdoor” access to encrypted data. Elias Groll of Foreign Policy summed up the argument by James Clapper, Director of National…
On September 3, 2015, UC Berkeley’s Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity hosted Dr. Chris C. Demchak, Grace M. Hopper Chair of Cyber Security and Director of the Center for Cyber Conflict Studies in the Strategic Research Department of the U.S. Naval War College. In a presentation entitled “Political and Economic Coercion…
Multiple media outlets have reported that a group of Russian-speaking hackers are “exploiting commercial satellites to siphon sensitive data from diplomatic and military agencies in the United States and in Europe as well as to mask their location.” In covering the story in the Washington Post, Ellen Nakashima noted that…
In a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal, “The Hacked Data Broker? Be Very Afraid,“ Christopher Mims reports on the potential for a massive exposure of data that would “make the hack of infidelity site Ashley Madison look like a footnote by comparison.” “Even more daunting,” he writes, “it…
Writing in Network World, Patrick Nelson reports on recent advances in quantum computing that could represent a step toward the so-called “cybersecurity Armageddon,” in which encryption is rendered useless in the face of staggeringly fast computers. “The number crunching behind cryptographic keys could one day become as painless to untangle…
Citing the “fraud, deceit, and stupidity” of its target, the self-described “Impact Team” posted 10 gigabytes worth of personal data—including names, passwords, and credit card numbers—for 37 million customers of Toronto-based Ashley Madison, a website set up to facilitate extramarital affairs. The Guardian reported on one of the many ripples…
The New York Times recently published a jaw-dropping visualization to depict how much of Americans’ private information is already in the hands of hackers. The questionnaire asks first whether you have “applied for a job with or worked for the federal government since 2000? (following the wake of the hack…
The Congressional Research Service has published “Cyber Intrusion into U.S. Office of Personnel Management: In Brief,” a report on the cyberattack on the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) that was estimated to have compromised sensitive information of 21.5 million individuals. The breach, the report notes, was was detected “partly…
A team of researchers in Israel showed they could use a feature phone (i.e. predecessor to the smart phone) to capture data through the electromagnetic waves generated from a desktop computer. As reported in by Kim Zetter in Wired, the implication is that “air-gapping”— the separation of networks from the…
The recent news that Fiat Chrysler cars were vulnerable to takeover through remote hacking was unnerving enough. Now it seems the issue could be more far-reaching. Fiat Chrysler recalled approximately 1.4 million vehicles after cybersecurity researchers demonstrated they could use a wireless connection to turn off a Jeep Cherokee’s engine…
“Behavioral biometrics”—the use of individual behavioral traits, such as how someone swipes the mouse or uses a keyboard—represents a significant new frontier in online security. As reported by Dan Goodin on Ars Technica, researchers recently demonstrated they could identify Internet users based on how they type, even when using anonymization…
The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE), an agency established by the established in 2012 by the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the state of Maryland, and Montgomery County, Md, has published a report detailing the risks of using mobile devices for maintaining electronic health…
What does it mean to “use the Internet scientifically”? For web users in China, this phrase is used in online forums and other discourse to describe methods to circumvent Chinese Internet censorship. It is a parody of the phrase “Scientific Outlook on Development”, a slogan coined by former Chinese president…
Participants from a Fall 2014 class at the UC Berkeley School of Information have published a first-of-its-kind dataset collected using consumer-grade brainwave-sensing headsets during an in-class group exercise, along with the software code and visual stimulus used to collect the data. The dataset and documentation are available at https://bit.ly/synchronized-brain-recordings. The group…