This is cool.
The approach involves building a virtual SOHO network, which is in turn connected to a virtual Internet. Both the virtual LAN and WAN are populated with virtual machines. The suspected worm is introduced into this environment, and executed therein. The whole system is closely monitored as execution progresses in the isolated environment, and data is amassed describing what the suspected worm did as it executed. This data is then processed by the system in an attempt to automatically determine whether or not the suspect programming is performing actions indicative of a worm or internet-aware malware.
You can find the complete paper here: “An Environment for Controlled Worm Replication and Analysis“
From the International Herald Tribune:
Approval by the European Aviation Safety Agency means that, from September, passengers aboard Airbus aircraft outfitted with the OnAir system will be able to send and receive phone calls, SMS messages and e-mail messages while flying at altitudes above 3,000 meters, or 9,840 feet.
Cabin staff members will be able to turn off the system or restrict usage to text services like SMS, as they see fit.
This is a good idea. The rule against use of mobile phones while in flight has to be managed as any other risk, that is, modeling the threat, understanding the risk and mitigating it. The rate of change of technological and social environment means that these rules have to be reevaluated every so often. It certainly made no sense to keep early-80’s safety rules as if written in stone.
The provision against mobile phone usage below 3000 meters (during take off and landing) makes sense, although most people will continue to ignore it, as they do now.
This is funny and disturbing. Were they trying to make a point?
Taken in a Barcelona square named after George Orwell. The sign, in catalonian, says: “Area under surveillance”
Seen at this blog.
I’ve just discovered a new security-oriented LiveCD distro called WiFiSLAX, which is basically a remastered Backtrack geared towards 802.11 wireless audits and pentest. It is oriented to Spanish-speakers, and includes support for most wireless card drivers and the latest 802.11 pentest tools.
In the website there is information regarding the supported drivers list, included applications, and bluetooth-related stuff, some videos demonstrating its use, as well as a PDF presentation which explains all features and which tools you will find there. All in Spanish, by the way.
Download the ISO image from here.
I’ve just found this while browsing public del.icio.us links tagged with “security” (you’d be surprised at how much interesting stuff can be found there).
This is such a great idea. Harnessing the power of humans solving CAPTCHAs so perform accurate OCRs of print books. Stop the web-SPAM problem and help digitize books!
“About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day.”
[…]
“reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.”
They have plugins for all major blog/board systems, and I plan to give the Wordpress plugin a try!
It’s been some time since the last post. However I have a good excuse :)
Until I get up to speed again, here’s a funny newsclip from The Onion.
Al Qaeda Also Fed Up With Ground Zero Construction Delays
