News by Subject Technology & Engineering

Researchers at the University of York have shown that some commercial password managers may not be a watertight way to ensure cyber security. After creating a malicious app to impersonate a legitimate Google app, they were able to fool two out of five of the password managers they tested into giving away a password.

A German-American team of IT security researchers has investigated how users choose the PIN for their mobile phones and how they can be convinced to use a more secure number combination. They found that six-digit PINs actually provide little more security than four-digit ones. They also showed that the blacklist used by Apple to prevent particularly frequent PINs could be optimised and that it would make even greater sense to implement one on Android devices.

In recent years, organizations have experienced countless DDoS attacks, during which internet-connected devices are flooded with traffic -- often generated by many computers or phones called 'bots' that are infected by malware by a hacker and act in concert with each other. When an attacker ties up all the available connections with malicious traffic, no legitimate information -- like calling 911 in a real emergency -- can make it through.

Computer scientists at KU Leuven have once again exposed a security flaw in Intel processors. Jo Van Bulck, Frank Piessens, and their colleagues in Austria, the United States, and Australia gave the manufacturer one year's time to fix the problem.

Researchers at the Army's corporate laboratory in collaboration with the University of California, Riverside have identified an approach to network security that will enhance the effectiveness and timeliness of protection against adversarial intrusion and evasion strategies.

Using ultrasound waves propagating through a solid surface, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis were able to read text messages and make fraudulent calls on a cellphone sitting on a desk up to 30 feet away.

Instead of blocking hackers, a new cybersecurity defense approach developed by University of Texas at Dallas computer scientists actually welcomes them. The method, called DEEP-Dig (DEcEPtion DIGging), ushers intruders into a decoy site so the computer can learn from hackers' tactics. The information is then used to train the computer to recognize and stop future attacks.