InteloQuence » Security

E-voting whistleblower Hari Prasad arrested, taken to Mumbai for questioning

Joseph L. Flatley — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 16:46:00 +0000

In America, when you demonstrate what a racket e-voting is, you get to play Pac-Man. In India? You just might get arrested. Security researcher Hari Prasad made waves earlier this month when he demonstrated how an e-voting machine might be compromised, live on national television. It is now being reported that police have taken Prasad into custody, ostensibly for the theft of the machine, although folks in the know are suggesting that a cover-up is in the works. For Prasad’s part, he refuses to give up the source of the machine — and has been

Apple attempts to patent kill switch that roots out unauthorized users, detects jailbreaks

Sean Hollister — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 00:58:00 +0000

digg_url = ‘http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/21/apple-attempts-to-patent-kill-switch-that-roots-out-unauthorized/’; Just about every mobile operating system manufacturer can remotely delete apps from the smartphones they help provide, but if a recent patent application is any indication, Apple’s looking to lock down the whole enchilada on future devices. The basic concept is as simple as the diagram above — certain activities trigger the phone to think it’s in the wrong hands — but the particular activities and particular remedies Apple suggests extend to audiovisual spying (to detect if a user has a different face or voice

Conceptual airport identifier skips your naughty bits, scans straight to the bone

Tim Stevens — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 14:13:00 +0000

Not sure how you feel about those airport scanners that reveal your bits and pieces to under-paid guards? We think they make air travel rather titillating, but perhaps you’ll be more comfortable with a conceptual scanner that skips your fleshy bits entirely and looks only at your bones. Being developed by a team of researchers at Wright State University, such a scanner could use existing technology to detect the skeletal structure of a person. The idea is that a person’s bony bits are unique and, unlike one’s face, impossible to disguise (short of some serious surgery).

Intel acquires McAfee for $7.68 billion

Joseph L. Flatley — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 13:20:00 +0000

Well, we got our copy of McAfee Antivirus for $29, but it looks like Intel had something a little more substantial in mind. The latter has picked up the Santa Clara-based security / antivirus company for a cool $7.68 billion, which works out to $48 per share in cash. Intel informs us that it will function as a wholly owned subsidiary (under the control of its Software and Services group). This comes hot on the heels of the company’s acquisition of TI’s cable modem unit, and possibly signals a new focus on security for

GPUs democratize brute force password hacking

Joseph L. Flatley — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 20:11:00 +0000

It seems that the availability of increasingly powerful GPUs, when combined with brute-force password cracking tools, is making it increasingly easy to crack passwords — even if they’re extremely well thought out, with symbols and quirky capitalization and all that. How short is too short? According to computer scientists at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, “a seven-character password is hopelessly inadequate, and as GPU power continues to go up every year, the threat will increase.” A better alternative, he suggested, would be a 12-character combination of upper and lower case letters, symbols and digits.

SNAP for iOS gives you The Power… to appraise your Facebook privacy

Joseph L. Flatley — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 12:34:00 +0000

SNAP (Social Network Analyzer for Privacy) by BIT Systems does one thing, and one thing only: it looks at your Facebook profile and then “grades you on how visible you are to the outside world.” Of course, you can always just go into Facebook itself and look at your privacy settings, which would save you the steps of downloading an app and using it to login to your account, but at least the thing is free. And it does provide a handy and thorough tutorial on Facebook privacy in general. Hit the source link

Shocker: Touchscreen smudge may give away your Android password pattern

Richard Lai — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 07:18:00 +0000

Fast food connoisseurs should pay special attention here — according to a recent paper by the University of Pennsylvania, Android users are inadvertently leaving their nine-dot lock patterns in the open, courtesy of their fingers’ oily smear on the screen. Specifically, the study on potential “smudge attacks” found that partial or complete patterns could be easily retrieved — even with added noise on the display or after incidental clothing contact — by using various lighting and camera orientation settings for the smear analysis. Should we be surprised? No. But should our phones be getting Froyo

Apple releases iOS 4.0.2 for iPhone and 3.2.2 for iPad, fixes PDF vulnerability

Nilay Patel — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 19:11:00 +0000

Bad news, jailbreakers: as promised, Apple’s just released iOS 4.0.2 for the iPhone and 3.2.2 for the iPad, both of which close the PDF exploit used by JailbreakMe. That appears to be the only change — it’s definitely good news for anyone concerned about iOS security, although we’re guessing the Dev Team is hard at work finding a new way to crack iOS open once again. We’ll let you know if we find anything else — won’t you do the same?

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