November 10, 2009, 01:07 PM ET
Improving Mobile-Device Security
As mobile phones begin functioning more like minicomputers, they also take on more security risks.
That's why the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology recently received a $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to work toward developing safer mobile devices and telecommunication networks that serve such devices. The project's researchers hope to protect mobile devices from viruses and malware that can steal personal information.
“Since mobile phones typically lack security features found on desktop computers, such as antivirus software, we need to accept that the mobile devices will ultimately be successfully attacked," said Jonathon Giffin, an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science, in a news release. "Therefore our research focus is to develop effective attack-recovery strategies.”
First,...
Read MoreOctober 21, 2009, 01:00 PM ET
How Good Is Windows 7 for Colleges?
With the new Microsoft operating system, Windows 7,
hitting the shelves tomorrow, there has been a lot of hoopla
surrounding the product. But will it help colleges? Microsoft
representatives demonstrated the new operating system at The
Chronicle's offices to bolster a claim that the new Windows —
unlike a previous effort, the much-reviled Vista -- will be a major
boon for higher education.
To find out if the product lives up to the hype, The
Chronicle spoke with a number of college CIO's and IT project
managers who have already tested and, to various degrees, deployed
Windows 7. Their conclusion: Microsoft has taken a solid step
forward, creating something that could save institutions some money
and improve security, and is decidedly not Vista. But at the same
time the new OS, in the words...
September 16, 2009, 02:00 PM ET
Google Says Gotcha to ReCaptcha, the Word-Puzzle Company
Search giant Google Inc. announced today that it has purchased reCaptcha, a company that began as a research project at Carnegie Mellon University. ReCaptcha develops online word puzzles to serve both as Web-site security and to help digitize printed text, and Google says it will use it in projects like Google Books and Google News Archive Search.
The Carnegie Mellon researchers began their reCaptcha project in 2007 in the hope of killing two birds with one stone. The method takes the distorted word puzzles aimed at keeping hackers and spambots from logging into Web pages, and turns them into micro-archiving machines.
The project...
Read MoreSeptember 10, 2009, 02:00 PM ET
Operators of .Edu Domain Plan to Boost Security
The operators of the .edu domain are planning to enhance
security for .edu Web sites, in a move experts say is long
overdue.
Once the new system is in place, work that is expected to be
completed by March of next year, it should be harder for a third
party with bad intentions to take control of .edu sites protected
by the security system. Called Domain Name System Security
Extensions, it uses a digital signature to verify that the site
being visited is in fact the site it purports to be. People
browsing Web sites will be less likely to be redirected to
malicious sites posing as legitimate ones.
Web sites ending in .edu will be able to opt into the security
system. A spokesman for Educause, a nonprofit group that
operates the .edu
domain...
September 03, 2009, 03:00 PM ET
RIAA Says Student Continues to Encourage Illegal Downloading
Joel Tenenbaum, a graduate student at Boston University, may have lost his historic court case with the Recording Industry Association of America this summer, but he has become a cult hero on several pirate Web sites. And now the RIAA charges that Mr. Tennenbaum is encouraging illegal music downloading by egging on his fans via Twitter.
In July, a federal jury ordered Mr. Tenenbaum to pay $675,000 to record labels for downloading and distributing 30 songs by several artists, including Nirvana, Eminem, and the Beastie Boys. Now, it says Mr. Tenenbaum is encouraging others to illegally download music as well. On Tuesday, it filed for injunctive...
Read MoreJuly 23, 2009, 03:07 PM ET
Spam Filters Foil Cal State Faculty's Vote on Furlough
Members of California State University's faculty union are
trying to vote online on whether to accept an unpaid furlough of
two days per month. But first they have to solve a spam-filter
problem.
The proposed furlough is part of efforts to close a huge budget
deficit in the Cal State system that results from California's
statewide financial woes. On Tuesday the system's Board of Trustees
approved a 20-percent tuition increase.
The faculty voting began 10 days ago, when a third-party firm
contracted by the union, the California Faculty Association, began
e-mailing online ballots to the union's members. The vote was
scheduled to end a week later, in time to announce the results in
advance of Tuesday's meeting of the board.
But the end of voting was extended until Wednesday after servers on
several of the campuses rejected the...
May 01, 2009, 02:59 PM ET
Johns Hopkins Lab Joins U.S. Cyberdefense Effort
Cyberwarfare is in the spotlight — and a Johns Hopkins University lab is taking part in the fight.
The New York Times reports that President Obama is expected to propose an expanded digital defense push as the country grapples with “thousands of daily attacks on federal and private computer systems.”
One aspect of the government’s computer strategy involves building a “cyber-range” to test security technology and defend networks. The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, a division of the university, has been awarded $7.3 million to work on the initial phase of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project.
The...
Read MoreApril 30, 2009, 11:25 AM ET
Brothers Indicted in Huge College Spam Scheme
Two brothers used the University of Missouri computer network in a national spamming operation that allegedly culled e-mail addresses from more than 2,000 colleges and bombarded them with messages, prosecutors alleged Wednesday.
The spammers developed e-mail extracting programs that harvested more than eight million student e-mail addresses, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri. They allegedly sold more than $4.1-million in products in at least 31 spam e-mail marketing campaigns, inflicting damage on the University of Missouri network in the process.
The brothers — Amir Ahmad Shah, 28, and Osmaan Ahmad Shah, 25 — are both University of Missouri graduates, according to The...
Read MoreApril 15, 2009, 04:10 PM ET
After Police Confiscate His Computer, Boston College Student Fights Back
A Boston College undergraduate has asked a judge in Massachusetts to invalidate a search warrant issued to the police last month that led to the seizure of the student’s computers, iPod, cellphone, digital camera, and other electronic devices.
Boston College police officers, working with state law-enforcement officers, made the search of his dormitory room as part of an investigation into allegations that the student, Riccardo Calixte, broke into a campus computer system to change grades and possessed a digital collection of pirated movies and music, among other things. No charges have been filed against Mr. Calixte.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation issued a statement this week on behalf of Mr. Calixte, whom The Chronicle could not reach for comment. Lawyers for the group, which promotes civil...
Read MoreApril 13, 2009, 04:29 PM ET
Conficker Infects More Than 700 Computers at U. of Utah
The latest variant of the Conficker worm—sophisticated computer malware that uses the Internet to invade and extract data from computers running Windows operating systems—infected between 700 and 800 computers at the University of Utah, primarily ones belonging to faculty and staff members in the university’s health-sciences center.
Officials at the university are saying that computer-security personnel were able to successfully trap and kill the worm by disabling Web connections campuswide before Conficker could begin exporting sensitive data from the infected computers.
Information-technology staff members noticed Friday morning that their Internet browsers were unusually sluggish, said Phil Sahm, a spokesperson for the health-sciences center. Knowing from
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