Tech News

Dozens of amateur and professional cryptographers signed up last week for the United States\' first open competition to create a secure algorithm for generating hashes -- the digital fingerprints widely used in a variety of security functions. The contest, run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), seeks to find a strong replacement for the current family of hash functions, some of which have been shown to be cryptographically weaker than originally thought. Click below to read more.

All it takes for a good scare this Halloween season is a search for \"Halloween costumes\": That query turns up legitimate Web pages that have been infected by the attackers, according to researchers at Trend Micro. Trickster attackers have inserted Web pages on the legit Halloween costume sites that come up in a search and used rogue JavaScript that invisibly redirects the user to a malicious page. It\'s a new twist on an old trick of manipulating search-engine optimization, according to the researchers. \"Usually in SEO Poisoning Attacks, malware authors compromise websites that are already top ranked in search engines...\" Click below to read more.

A recent compromise at a corporation led to a significant amount of data being stolen, underscoring that traditional software defenses are hard pressed to catch obfuscated attacks, security firm Finjan said in its monthly analysis of Internet threats. In the report, dubbed the Malicious Page of the Month, the company claims that a desktop PC at an unnamed firm had been infected with a data-stealing Trojan horse. The attack succeeded because the firms antivirus software and static Web filters could not identify the scrambled attack code as a threat, Finjan stated in the report. The result: The malicious software downloaded code from a server in Utah and sent files and transcripts of a number of corporate users to a second server in Texas. Obfuscation FTW! Click below to read more.

A major flaw in Microsoft\'s Windows operating system remained, for the most part, unexploited over the weekend, according to the software giant and security firms. While some researchers have created proof-of-concept attacks for the bug in the Windows Server service, Microsoft has not seen \"evidence of public, reliable exploit code showing code execution,\" Christopher Budd, a security program manager for Microsoft, said in a blog post on Sunday. Want a chance to make a mark? Fire up those virtuals and get to work! Click below to read more.

An international team of scientists has performed the ultimate miniaturisation of computer memory: storing information inside the nucleus of an atom. This breakthrough is a key step in bringing to life a quantum computer - a device based on the fundamental theory of quantum mechanics which could crack problems unsolvable by current technology. In the quantum world, objects such as atoms are allowed to exist in multiple states simultaneously -- that is, they could literally be in two places at once or possess a number of other seemingly mutually exclusive properties. Quantum computing is seen as the holy grail of computing because each individual piece of information, or ‘bit’, can have more than one value at once, as opposed to current technology which is limited to either 1s or 0s. This yields unprecedented processing power and thus dramatically widens the scope of what computers can do. The problem: How do you isolate a quantum bit from a noisy environment to protect the deli-cate quantum information, while at the same time allowing it to interact with the outside world so that it can be manipulated and measured?

Undergraduate and graduate students in an advanced computer security course at Rice University in Houston are learning hands-on just how easy it is to wreak havoc on computer software used in today\'s voting machines. In 2006, electronic voting machines accounted for 41 percent of the tallied U.S. votes. His research involves computer security and the issues of building secure and robust software systems for the Internet. Click read more for further information.