The Chinese Government has “pervasive access” to 80 percent of the world’s communications even military-grade encryption no longer provides sufficient protection to sensitive data, a former Pentagon analyst warns.
UPDATE: A string of high-profile hacks against online forums and companies continued on Thursday, with news that forums hosted by the technology firm NVIDIA as well as the surf-ware vendor Billabong.
Few things tend to spark debates and controversy in the security community like a new piece of cryptographic research. The paper by a group of academic researchers on an improvement to a padding oracle attack on certain hardware security tokens publicized this week is no different, with RSA officials saying the research contributes nothing in the way of breaking new ground. Cryptographers beg to differ.
A group of international academic researchers has made a major advance in the efficiency of a known cryptographic attack on some kinds of crypto hardware, enabling them to extract sensitive keys from tokens such as RSA SecurID and Aladdin eToken devices within 20 minutes. However, experts say that the attack does not represent a catastrophic failure for the tokens.
Software failures were behind 24 percent of all the medical device recalls in 2011, according to data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which said it is gearing up its labs to spend more time analyzing the quality and security of software-based medical instruments and equipment.
If you use encryption products to protect your data or communications, you owe a debt of gratitude to Phil Zimmermann. Now, Zimmermann is aiming to collect on that debt with his new company, Silent Circle, a startup that will provide secure phone, email and SMS communications.
Researchers digging through the code of the recently discovered Flame worm say they have come across a wealth of evidence that suggests Flame and the now-famous Stuxnet worm share a common origin.
This week’s revelations about leaks of user passwords from the professional networking site LinkedIn, dating Web site eHarmony.com and music site Last.fm suggest that even tech-savvy firms are slow to accept that hashes -a once-reliable technology for storing data online – now offer scant protection for sensitive data.
The past week has brought to light more revelations about the mysterious Flame (or sKyWIper) worm that was first identified at the end of May. Among them: the eye-popping admission from Microsoft that the malware’s authors found a way to use that company’s Windows Update feature to distribute the malware.
UPDATE Professional social networking site LinkedIn announced early Wednesday morning that it was looking into reports of stolen passwords, according to a post on their Twitter page.
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