Robert Lemos

Could USB Flash Drives Be Your Enterprise's Weakest Link?

On any particular day, a horde of devices with flash memory are carried behind corporate firewalls and connected to business networks. It's a threat that many companies are not equipped to handle.

Last week, the U.S. military highlighted this fact when it confirmed that an attack on its systems in 2008 originated with a flash drive plugged into a military computer located in the Middle East. The infection "spread undetected on both classified and unclassified systems, establishing what amounted to a digital beachhead, from which data could be transferred to servers under foreign control," U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense William J. Lynn III wrote in an Aug. 25 essay.

DarkReading

InfoWorld Tech Watch Blog - Week of August 23, 2010

Published this week: Pac-Man for president: Hack highlights e-voting flaws • The Pentagon plays security catch-up

Wireless Car Sensors Vulnerable to Hackers

Hackers could "hijack" the wireless pressure sensors built into many cars' tires, researchers have found. Criminals might then track a vehicle or force its electronic control system to malfunction, the University of South Carolina and Rutgers University researchers say.

The team, which successfully hijacked two popular tire-pressure-monitoring systems (TPMS), will describe the work at the USENIX Security conference in Washington, DC, this week.

Technology Review

Gaming Chips Score in Data Centers

When Axel Kohlmeyer, the associate director of the Institute for Computational Molecular Science at Temple University, needed a large cluster of computers on which to run his models of physical molecular interactions, he could not always get time on the supercomputers managed by the major academic centers.

"To do this number of calculations for the phase diagrams, you would not have the computer power locally, so you would have to apply to the supercomputing centers, but our research is not necessarily attractive to them, so we would not get the time," Kohlmeyer says.

CIO.com

Nasty iPhone Worm Hints at the Future

As mobile phones get more powerful, the threat of serious attacks against such devices increases, security experts warn. This week, cybercriminals moved closer to proving this point--exploiting a weakness in modified iPhones to spread a worm programmed to steal banking information. Some experts say the worm may be a sign that criminals are getting more savvy about hacking mobile devices.

Technology Review

Intel to electronically ID chips

Intel Corp. will unveil plans to embed identification numbers in its PC processors on Thursday, said industry insiders and cryptographers familiar with the company''s efforts. In doing so, the Santa Clara, Calif., chip maker could be sounding the death knell for anonymity on the Internet.

ZDNet News