Security

Use Your Phone To Control Your Door Locks

If you’ve ever lost your keys while out on the town, you know there’s no way in hell you’re getting them back. Luckily, we tend to clutch our cellphones dear to our heart, never letting them out of our site. If you have a Schlage LiNK system, you need not worry about having keys anymore. Essentially, the LiNK system uses ...

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Sniffing Keystrokes By Monitoring Magnetic Field

Two doctoral students, Martin Vuagnoux and Sylvain Pasini from the Security and Cryptography Laboratory at the Swiss Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, have discovered a potential threat to security that declares keyboards “unsafe to transmit sensitive information”. By monitoring signals produced by keystrokes, the researchers were able to reproduce what had been typed on 11 different keyboards using a variety ...

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RFID Passports: Are They Secure?

Need even more proof that RFID doesn’t improve security? According to a group of hackers who bypassed an ePassport RFID authentication at an Amsterdam airport, RFID passports aren’t as secure as people think. Using software to design custom identities as well as convincing scanners to accept fabricated RFID chips, the hackers got around security without raising suspicion. They used an ...

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The Virus In Space

Get your mind out of the gutter, friend! I wasn’t referring to the terrible diarrhea the crew of the ISS got a hold of. To be quite honest, I’m talking about a nasty little worm for Windows that NASA somehow happened to miss. The infection, known as W32.TGammima.AG, can steal passwords and fuck up your system – something you don’t ...

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What’s That Noise? Just My Kid Drowning

Not every kid can swim like Michael Phelps, though every kid ought to. Parents, we understand. Sometimes you just don’t feel like sitting around watching the kids splash the water from the safety of dry land. After all, if they aren’t winning Olympic gold, what’s the point? That’s exactly why you bought the Safety Turtle Wireless Pool Security System for ...

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Defcon Mystery Challenge

Looks like Defcon 16 is one of the best yet. The “Defcon 16 Mystery Challenge” is a competition for attendees to have at. Solve a series of puzzles and mysteries and you could win special black Defcon badges that give you free admittance for life. One of the puzzles includes this delightful yellow ball with a combination lock on the ...

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Freedom Stick Could Cause The Opposite

Going to Beijing for the upcoming Olympic games? Well, if you weren’t aware, China is not a democracy. Their nation-wide firewall leaves access to certain websites blocked, dulling your internet experience. No worries, thanks to Germany’s Chaos Computer Club’s USB dongle dubbed The Freedom Stick. For just $30, this device is preloaded with software which will secure your connection, routing ...

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Three French Journalists Tossed From Black Hat ’08

We’re not actively covering the Black Hat 2008 security conference currently going on in Las Vegas but there is some crazy stuff happening. Similar to when I attended Defcon years ago with Hack a Day, there was a Wall of Sheep. The WoS displays people who got hacked and insecure connections to prove a point and expose weaknesses in wireless ...

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A Sensor That Mimicks The Human Eye

We’ve seen artificial corneas that could replace damaged organic corneas, but how about a digital image sensor that adjusts itself like a human retina? That’s exactly what John Rogers at the University of Illinois is creating. An improved method of transferring silicon sensors onto a curved surface allowing for the sensor to capture wide-angle views with low distortion. Because it ...

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The Government Wants To Get All Up In Your Laptop

Everybody knows it can be dangerous to have porn on your computer at work, but now it seems like none of your files are safe from prying eyes. Thanks to some recent court rulings and new policies at the Department of Homeland Security, any traveler crossing the US border can have their laptops and other electronic devices seized and examined ...

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