Canberra crawls towards national cyber-security approach
Australia’s federal government is about to announce its first tottering steps towards a national strategy on cyber-security. However, unlike the USA, Australia is unlikely to treat Internet-borne attacks as something demanding gunships and bombing raids as a response.
According to reports on Friday morning, government networks suffer constant attacks. A former ASIO head Dennis Richardson, now department secretary at Foreign Affairs, told a Senate Committee that attacks on his department happen on a daily basis. Read more...
Update: Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo collaborate in search
In a rare display of collaboration, Google has joined forces with its search rivals Microsoft and Yahoo in a project intended to improve the Web crawling and indexing of structured data, which often originates in databases and loses its format when converted into HTML.
The three companies have launched a site called Schema.org, which contains a common set of HTML tags that they hope webmasters will use to mark up structured data on their sites.
"Schema.org aims to be a one stop resource for webmasters looking to add markup to their pages to help search engines better understand their websites," Google said in a blog post. Read more...
Why the bad guys are winning
There was a show on CNBC recently about cyber threats. The show was pretty much what you would expect when an organization ventures away from its core competence. Imagine if Computerworld did a story on derivatives or CDOs.
As is typical of the mainstream media covering computer topics, most of those interviewed were self-serving. People and companies that make a living defending computer systems, saying how bad things are and thus implying how necessary their services are. We've seen this before.
Sadly, the show did nothing to educate viewers about Defensive Computing. I guess there are no ratings in telling people to eat their virtual vegetables. The Firesheep demo didn't even refer to Firesheep by name so an interested viewer wouldn't know what to search for online. Read more...
Google adds ‘+1′ rating feature to Android Market
Google is giving Android Market users a new way to evaluate applications even as it struggles to keep malicious ones off the store.
The "+1" feature on the Android Market is intended to be a more personalized complement to the standard star-based app-rating system that users have traditionally employed to give their opinions on applications.
BACKGROUND: More malware apps sneak onto Android Market
The premise is simple: If you like a particular application on the Android Market, you can sign into your Google account and give it a +1 that all of your other Google contacts will be able to see when they click on the app. In other words, you'll be able to see whether or not your friends and acquaintances are fans of a particular game just by clicking to see if any people you know have recommended it. Friends' and contacts' +1 ratings will also appear in search results if they have recommended any products or websites relating to the search keywords, Google says. Read more...
IBM aims cloud services at universities, colleges
IBM announced a cloud-computing service on Thursday that will let universities and colleges build custom private clouds that can be integrated into public cloud services. IBM also has a similar initiative underway for K-12 schools.
The IBM SmartCloud for Education, as it's called, "is an infrastructure service," says Mike King, vice president of global education industry at IBM. The service is built on IBM hardware servers and uses open software from the Virtual Computing Lab which is built by and for education under a collaboration project that started a number of years ago with North Carolina State University. Some technology developed by IBM has been donated to the Apache Foundation. Read more...
Caltech researchers scale up DNA computing
Researchers from the California Institute of Technology have built what they claim is the world's largest computational circuit based on DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), using a technology that they said could easily scale to even greater complexity.
The development of the new approach, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, is a significant step in the march toward controlling biological systems with standard information-processing techniques.
One day, DNA computing could execute logical functions much like regular silicon-based computers do today. But DNA computers would be much smaller and more easily integrated into biological systems, such as the human body. For example, biological circuits could be directly embedded in cells or tissues to detect and treat diseases. Read more...
Apple strikes back at newest Mac scareware
Apple on Wednesday updated the malware engine included with Snow Leopard to detect the newest version of MacDefender, the fake antivirus program that's plagued users for the last month.
The update was the latest in what researchers have called a cat-and-mouse game between Apple and the cyber criminals shilling bogus security software.
Apple updated XProtect, the bare bones anti-malware tool tucked into Mac OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard, shortly after 2 p.m. PT Wednesday, to detect what the company tagged as "OSX.MacDefender.C." Read more...
Hotmail and Yahoo users also victims of targeted attacks
Web mail users at Yahoo and Hotmail have been hit with the same kind of targeted attacks that were disclosed earlier this week by Google, according to security software vendor Trend Micro.
Trend Micro described two similar attacks against Yahoo Mail and Windows Live Hotmail in a blog post, published Thursday. "It's an ongoing issue for more than just Gmail," said Nart Villeneuve, a senior threat researcher with Trend Micro. Villeneuve believes that Facebook accounts have also been used to spread similar attacks. Read more...
Windows 8 may give Microsoft a tablet play
Can Microsoft's next-generation, touch-oriented Windows 8 OS give Microsoft a leg-up in the tablet computer market now dominated by Apple's iPad?
The quick answer seems to be a resounding no. The highly successful iPad is being chased by a host of contenders, including Android tablets, that have already been on the market for months.
Still, there are some things in favor of Windows 8 on tablets, analysts said. Read more...
Sony Pictures falls victim to major data breach
LulzSec, a hacking group that recently made news for hacking into PBS, claimed today that it has broken into several Sony Pictures websites and accessed unencrypted personal information on over 1 million people.
In a statement released Thursday, the group claimed that it had also managed to compromise all "admin details," including administrator passwords, as well as 75,000 "music codes" and 3.5 million "music coupons" from Sony networks and websites.
The group has publicly posted a full list of compromised sites, along with links to documents containing samples of what it claimed was material stolen from Sony. Read more...