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Another UN Site Is Hacked
My blog entry for yesterday now appears almost prophetic as reports emerge today that another UN site has been hacked using, guess what, a SQL Injection vulnerability. The site belongs to the UN...
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How Do They Do IT: Spam Filters
The current mechanisms for blocking junk email fall into one of the following categories:User definedBlack listsWhite listsBayesian filteringUser DefinedWe are all probably aware that our email client...
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Capturing The Imagination
Sometimes there are things that you run across, completely outside your field of expertise, that simply capture your imagination. Recently I became interested in computer generated animation that...
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Supercomputers Enable Immersive Experiences
As someone who is a unusual mixture of physicist, engineer, statistician and computer scientist, I have long known the value of being able to visualise your data. As computing power and data storage...
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Hackers Serve Notice Of An Interesting Year To Come
To paraphrase Douglas Admas' mega computer, "Deep Thought", I speak not of the attacks that have happened in 2011 but of those that are to come. 2011 has been dubbed by many in the press as "the year...
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When Does A "Tool" Become A "Weapon"?
As with so many tools, security vulnerability detectors can be misused to exploit rather than defend. The Metasploit Project is an extremely valuable tool and many of us in cyber security use it to...
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Is Anonymous Cyber Cash Good Or Bad?
Online currencies are not new. Since the dotcom boom there have been those who have sought to provide a service that enables non-traditional means of payment online. However, most of the mechanisms...
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The Internet In 60 Seconds
Being the last day of 2011, like everyone else, I've been reading about the events that shaped the year. Then it struck me that technology moves so quickly that what shaped the year in January was...
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How People Really Read Your Page
If, like me, you use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn (and a whole host of other social media sites) then, again like me, you might have wondered how people actually read your pages. I've long wondered how...
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Video Introducing Cyber Security At Surrey
Here is a brief video we produced at the University of Surrey to introduce cyber security, and the work we are doing there:
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An Emerging Threat To Public-Key Encryption
One of the perennial problems with symmetric-key encryption has been establishing a secure channel over which to pass the secret key. It has always been much easier to compromise the transmission of...
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When Is Random Really Random?
A surprising amount of what we do in computer security relies upon the use of random numbers and yet not many of us actually take the time to think about how these numbers are being generated. We...
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Security Flaw in eBanking Affects Over 100 Million Users
I sometimes find myself slightly irrated by having to prove that I am a human online, most often by using the Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHAs)....
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Law Of First Digits & How It Might Lead To More Trust
In 1938 a physicist called Frank Benford wrote a paper about something that he had noticed concerning collections of numbers. These data sets were real life situations and were surprisingly diverse...
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Quantum Computing Within 5 years: Yes or No?
Read the article I helped craft on the BBC site.
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How The Internet Is Changing Our World
Watch the video I did with the Royal Gepgraphical Century as part of their 21st Century Challenges programme.
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Privacy Through Uncertainty: Quantum Cryptography
Read my piece for Scientific American on how quantum effects can help ensure privacy, and what this might mean for the future of quantum information technology in general.
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Cloud Storage: Getting Your Priorities Straight
Following the fuss about the terms of service attached to the new Google Drive cloud storage service, I have tried to explain that there are other, perhaps more important, matters that need to be...
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Flame Worm Analysed
Read the story and the top level analysis I did with the BBC about the Flame trojan that has hit the middle east region. If it has been in the wild since 2007, as analysis suggests, then the...
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The Missing Link Between Stuxnet & Flame
You can read the latest analyis I've been doing for the BBC about Flame here. It's based on information made available by Kaspersky, a summary of which you can read here. In short, it looks as if some...
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