In-brief: Facebook announced the winner of its 2016 Internet Defense Prize last week. Researchers from universities in The Netherlands, Germany and Turkey to receive the $100,000 prize for a paper improving protections against attacks on TLS by quantum computers.
In-brief: One of every five software vulnerabilities discovered in vehicles in the last three years are rated “critical” and are unlikely to be resolved through after the fact security fixes, according to an analysis by the firm IOActive.
The BBC reports that thousands of seismic sensors monitoring geological activity are vulnerable to manipulation by way of cyber attack, though the seismic gear maker disputes the researchers’ findings. The poor security controls around the way the sensors transmit data were detailed in a presentation at the Def Con hacker convention. Researchers found ways to fool and overload sensors so monitoring systems would get wildly inaccurate readings.The findings have been reported to the US computer emergency organisation (sp) that oversees national infrastructure. Nanometrics, the company that makes the sensor system that was probed disputed the researchers’ findings. Source: Security of seismic sensor grid probed – BBC News
In-brief: Akamai lead researcher Or Katz shares longitudinal data showing that blackhat SEO campaigns designed to improve the ranking of web sites that collect cheating and marital infidelity stories have worked.
In-brief:Ransomware may be the “most profitable malware in history,” according to a new report out from Cisco Systems. But it is being helped along by poor management of information technology assets as well as the advent of identity shielding technologies like BitCoin and the Tor network.
