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Category: cybercrime/malcode – Page 194

  • Researchers are using advancing technology to expand and augment our traditional senses, tapping into how our brains process signals and manipulating that sensory feedback.
  • This research is transforming lives, giving the blind ways to “see” and the deaf ways to “hear,” and it could one day lead to the development of new senses altogether.

Traditionally, humans have five recognized senses: sight, touch, taste, smell, and sound. In the strictest sense, our reality is defined by anything and everything we experience through those five senses, but today’s technology is allowing us to live in a world beyond them.

The idea that humans may have more senses isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. For example, our sense of balance and our body’s inherent pain monitoring capabilities would both be considered crucial sensory inputs. Not everyone experiences the traditional five senses in the same way, either. A small fraction of the population (around 4.4 percent) has synesthesia, a form of sensory perception that causes them to experience crosswired sensations such as “seeing” sounds or “feeling” tastes.

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Why is RAND opening a Bay Area office?

The San Francisco Bay Area is really at the center of technology and transformation. That’s also been a focus at RAND since our very first report, Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship, in 1946, which foretold the creation of satellites more than a decade before Sputnik.

Today, our researchers are working on important questions related to autonomous vehicles, drones, cybersecurity, education technology, virtual medicine—the same questions driving Silicon Valley startups and billion-dollar Bay Area corporations. At the same time, we’re looking at issues surrounding social inequality, drug policy, water resource management, and transportation, all of which directly relate to the Bay Area.

Continue reading “Innovation in the Bay Area: Q&A with Nidhi Kalra” | >

We’ve created the world’s first Spam-detecting AI trained entirely in simulation and deployed on a physical robot.

Our vision system successfully flagging a can of Spam for removal. The vision system is trained entirely in simulation, while the movement policy for grasping and removing the Spam is hard-coded. Our detector is able to avoid other objects, including healthy ones such as fruit and vegetables, which it never saw during training.

Deep learning-driven robotic systems are bottlenecked by data collection: it’s extremely costly to obtain the hundreds of thousands of images needed to train the perception system alone. It’s cheap to generate simulated data, but simulations diverge enough from reality that people typically retrain models from scratch when moving to the physical world.

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Legal frameworks, regulations and standards under the topic Defending the Core.

2017 will focus on the fundamental aspects of cyber security with a theme of Defending the Core. The 9th International Conference on Cyber Conflict will be held in Tallinn from May 30 through June 2, 2017.

CyCon is organised by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence. Every year, over 500 decision-makers and experts from government, military and industry from all over the world approach the conference’s key theme from legal, technology and strategy perspectives, often in an interdisciplinary manner.

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Continue reading “Cycon: Taking place in Tallinn from May 30th to June 2nd 2017 2017 will cover issues ranging from international cooperation and conflict in cyberspace to technical challenges and requirements” | >

BRUSSELS NATO plans to spend 3 billion euros ($3.24 billion) to upgrade its satellite and computer technology over the next three years as the Western military alliance adapts to new threats, a senior official said.

Seeking to deter hackers, and other threats including Iranian missiles, the investments underscore NATO’s recognition that conflicts are increasingly fought on computer networks as well as in the air, on land and at sea.

A senior official at the NATO Communications and Information Agency said the plans include a 1.7-billion-euro investment in satellite communications to better support troops and ships deployed across the alliance, as well as aiding the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones.

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JERUSALEM (AP) — As the world moves toward an era of self-driving cars, Israel is positioning itself to be the Detroit of the future.

The country has emerged as a global leader in the fast-growing field of driverless cars, as illustrated by Intel’s more than $15 billion acquisition of Israeli firm Mobileye this week.

Israel is now home to hundreds of startups that provide everything from sensors to cybersecurity to data collection for autonomous vehicles, putting it alongside Silicon Valley at the forefront of an industry that many expect to take off over the next decade.

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Abstract: In this paper we present a method which allows attackers to covertly leak data from isolated, air-gapped computers. Our method utilizes the hard disk drive (HDD) activity LED which exists in most of today’s desktop PCs, laptops and servers. We show that a malware can indirectly control the HDD LED, turning it on and off rapidly (up to 5800 blinks per second) — a rate that exceeds the visual perception capabilities of humans. Sensitive information can be encoded and leaked over the LED signals, which can then be received remotely by different kinds of cameras and light sensors. Compared to other LED methods, our method is unique, because it is also covert — the HDD activity LED routinely flickers frequently, and therefore the user may not be suspicious to changes in its activity. We discuss attack scenarios and present the necessary technical background regarding the HDD LED and its hardware control. We also present various data modulation methods and describe the implementation of a user-level malware, that doesn’t require a kernel component. During the evaluation, we examine the physical characteristics of different colored HDD LEDs (red, blue, and white) and tested different types of receivers: remote cameras, extreme cameras, security cameras, smartphone cameras, drone cameras, and optical sensors. Finally, we discuss hardware and software countermeasures for such a threat. Our experiment shows that sensitive data can be successfully leaked from air-gapped computers via the HDD LED at a maximum bit rate of 4000 bits per second, depending on the type of receiver and its distance from the transmitter. Notably, this speed is 10 times faster than the existing optical covert channels for air-gapped computers. These rates allow fast exfiltration of encryption keys, keystroke logging, and text and binary files.

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Artificial intelligence boosters predict a brave new world of flying cars and cancer cures. Detractors worry about a future where humans are enslaved to an evil race of robot overlords. Veteran AI scientist Eric Horvitz and Doomsday Clock guru Lawrence Krauss, seeking a middle ground, gathered a group of experts in the Arizona desert to discuss the worst that could possibly happen — and how to stop it.

Their workshop took place last weekend at Arizona State University with funding from Tesla Inc. co-founder Elon Musk and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn. Officially dubbed “Envisioning and Addressing Adverse AI Outcomes,” it was a kind of AI doomsday games that organized some 40 scientists, cyber-security experts and policy wonks into groups of attackers — the red team — and defenders — blue team — playing out AI-gone-very-wrong scenarios, ranging from stock-market manipulation to global warfare.

Horvitz is optimistic — a good thing because machine intelligence is his life’s work — but some other, more dystopian-minded backers of the project seemed to find his outlook too positive when plans for this event started about two years ago, said Krauss, a theoretical physicist who directs ASU’s Origins Project, the program running the workshop. Yet Horvitz said that for these technologies to move forward successfully and to earn broad public confidence, all concerns must be fully aired and addressed.

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In Brief

  • Through the hive mind, everyone would be connected to everyone else telepathically, and we could all share our thoughts, memories, and even dreams with one another.
  • Though a global hive mind would be susceptible to things like hacking or thought control, it could also lead to almost unimaginable levels of innovation.

Communication technology tends to develop in a particular direction: more people communicating across larger distances using less effort to do so. Taken to its logical extreme, perfect communication would be anyone being able to talk to anyone, anywhere, using no effort at all.

The closest concept we have to this form of communication is something called the hive mind. Everyone would be connected to everyone telepathically, and we could all share our thoughts, memories, and even dreams with one another. Such a system of communication would not only have far-reaching consequences, it would also be hugely controversial.

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