Recent Posts
UMBC ebiquity research blog
Return To Blog Listing
EBB is the ebiquity research group's blog at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). We focus on technologies that facilitate the design, implementation and control of distributed, intelligent information systems -- mobile and pervasive
Recent Posts Tagged With 'Security'
Twitter hacked by Iranian Cyber Army
TechCrunch is reporting that Twitter is down due to an attack by someone claiming to be part of the ‘Iranian Cyber Army’. Since Twitter is now down, we can’t show a screen shot, but Techrunch reports that a similar defacement is li...
foaf:mbox_sha1sum considered harmful
The foaf:mbox property is very useful since it is ‘inverse functional’ and can thus serve as an ID for a foaf individual. This lets us infer that two foaf profiles with the same mbox refer to the same person. Since publishing your email ...
Mathematical model predicts insurgent attacks
Mathematical model predicts insurgent attacks A paper just published in Nature, Common ecology quantifies human insurgency, describes a mathematical model that can be used to predict the the sizes and timing of violent events within different insurge...
Can cloud computing be entirely trusted?
The Economist has been running a series of online Oxford Union style debates on topical issues — CEO pay, healthcare, climate change, etc. The latest one is on the cloud computing: This house believes that the cloud can’t be entirely trus...
Takoma Park uses Scantegrity voter verifiable voting system
Yesterday was the first time a truly voter verifiable voting system was used in any binding government election, thanks in part to work being carried out at UMBC’s Cyber Defense Lab under the direction of Alan Sherman. Takoma Park, MD used the ...
Roesch on Effective Network Security in a Dynamic World
Martin Roesch will speak on Effective Network Security in a Dynamic World to kick off UMBC’s 10th Annual Visionaries in IT forum on Wednesday September 30. Martin Roesch, a respected authority on intrusion prevention and detection technology an...
DoD social media ambivalence
The Department of Defense remains conflicted about their position on social media. This past Sunday the US Marine Corps announced an immediate ban of Internet social networking sites on their NIPRNET network due to potential security risks. Specific...
DOS attacks on Twitter et al. focused on Georgian blogger Cyxymu
Elinor Mills of cnet reports that the DOS against twitter, facebook, livejournal and blogger were focused on a single Russian blogger using the name Cyxymu (??????). A pro-Georgian blogger with accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and Google&...
Apparent DDOS attacks on twitter, facebook and livejournal
It will be interesting to see what comes from today’s DDOS attacks on twitter, facebook and liveJournal. It is certainly a show of strength from whoever controls the botnets that launched the attacks. We can only assume that three three are f...
Changes in FaceBook default privacy policy
FaceBook is changing how it manages privacy starting today. After reading last week’s post on the FaceBook blog, More Ways to Share in the Publisher, and a followup note on ReadWriteWeb, A Closer Look at Facebook’s New Privacy Options, I ...
Cyberwar: can treaties avert an arms race
Should the nations of the world work toward a treaty banning or at least limiting cyberwars? If we don’t, might we fall into an arms race that could be bad for everyone? Would A war in cyberspace be less dangerous for people than traditional ...
UK discloses cyber attack capability
This week the BBC had a story about the UK’s cyber security programs, UK ‘has cyber attack capability’, with this video interview with Gordon Brown. The article leads with this surprising discussion of the UK’s offensive capa...
Gates puts NSA in charge of USCYBERCOM
The NYT reports in New Military Command for Cyberspace that the DoD has put NSA in charge of a unified U.S. Cyber Command to oversee the protection of military networks against cyber threats. “Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Tuesday order...
Bing vs. Google, side by side comparison
Microsoft’s new Bing search engine is getting a lot of interest. Glenn McDonald posts about a nice side-by-side Bing vs Google comparator tat he developed. It makes it easy to compare how the two services do on a range of different types of ...
Ebiquity Google alert tripwires triggered
Yesterday we discovered that our ebiquity blog had been hacked. It looks like a vulnerability in our old Wordpress installation was exploited to add the following code to the top of our blog’s main page. < ?php $site = create_function('','$ca...
Analyzing covert social networks
Science Daily notes a social networking paper that sounds interesting. “A new approach to analyzing social networks, reported in the current issue of the International Journal of Services Sciences, could help homeland security find the covert ...
Scantegrity cryptographic voting system to be used in binding governmental election
This November will be the first time any end-to-end cryptographic system will be used in a binding governmental election. UMBC Professor Alan Sherman and his students have been helping develop the Scantegrity open source election verification technol...
Warning: Google thinks every site may harm your computer
The Google has flipped out. Starting a few minutes ago when I try to click on any Google search result, I am shown the Google malware page. The one below was the result when I tried to click through to http://google.com/, the first result for searc...
DHS wants to mine social media for terrorism relatated data
USA Today reports (Feds may mine blogs for terrorism clues) that the US Department of Homeland Security wants to use data-mining technology to search blogs and Internet message boards to find those used by terrorists to plan attacks. “Blogging...
Wenjia Li: Coping with Node Misbehaviors in MANETs, 4pm Tue 1/6/08, 325b ITE, UMBC
Wenjia Li will present his dissertation proposal on ‘A Security Framework to Cope with Node Misbehaviors in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks’ which will be done under the supervision of Professor Anupam Joshi. The presentation will be at 4:00pm Tu...
How the Srizbi botnet escaped destruction to spam again
Just like Freddy Kreuger, botnets are hard to kill. In a series of posts on his Security Fix blog, Brian Krebs provides a good explanation of how the Srizbi botnet was able to come back to life after being killed (we thought!) earlier this month. &#...
CFP: IEEE Intelligence and Security Informatics
The ISI 2009 call for papers is out with deadlines of 20 January 2009 for papers and 20 February for tutorials or workshops proposals. Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI) has been established as an interdisciplinary subject that focuses on th...
Zombie apocalypse on the Internet
John Markoff has an article on botnets, A Robot Network Seeks to Enlist Your Computer, in today’s New York Times. It focuses on the efforts that Microsoft is taking to combat the botnet problem. “In a windowless room on Microsoft’s ca...
Jim Parker to defend dissertation: Detecting Malicious Behavior in Ad-hoc Networks, 9am 10/23/08
This Thursday (9am 10/23) UMBC Ph.D. student Jim Parker will defend his dissertation on Observation Techniques for Detecting Malicious Behavior in Ad-hoc Networks. Detecting malicious behaviour in MANETs is a tricky problem on which Jim has made cons...
