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DARPA’s self-repairing security system’s challenge.


In a few weeks, a town better known for events like the World Series of Poker will host the World Series of Hacking.

The finals of the Cyber Grand Challenge, which will be held by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the DEFCON security conference in Las Vegas next month, aim to see if a high performance computer system can discover and patch security systems automatically — without human intervention.

Yikes.


Britain’s railway network is notoriously overpriced, overcrowded, and experiences frequent delays. Now cyberattacks are threatening to turn the morning commute into a deathtrap as well.

The world’s oldest railway system has been the victim of four major cyberattacks in the past year alone, security experts claim.

Hackers, thought to be computer specialists working for foreign governments, are believed to be behind the online aggression, which could allow them to take control the railway’s physical infrastructure.

Not shocked by this because I have seen some of these policies in various forms already.


Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance Co. on Tuesday said it has launched a U.S. professional liability policy for architects and engineers that includes cyber coverage.

Professional First Architects & Engineers Professional Liability Insurance’s cyber coverage addresses media, technology and network security and privacy liability exposures, including the cost of responding to a data breach or network extortion threat, BHSI said in a statement.

The coverage also includes access to a network of experts to assist in responding to a data breach or extortion threat, and risk management services including contract reviews, newsletters and best practices webinars, according to the statement.

Makes me wonder how much money was spent on this technical masterpiece.


WARSAW—Officials blamed technical failure—not a cyberattack—for the recent outages of two websites affiliated with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

NATO’s cybersecurity experts were on heightened alert for cyberattacks during the alliance’s biennial summit, which has seen the organization’s top leaders gather in the Polish capital this week.

The main websites of the U.S.-based Allied Transformation Command and Germany-based NATO School, a subordinate unit to the transformation command, were down for several hours Thursday.

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Glad Google is doing this because next month could be a real test when China launches its Quantum Satellite.


Today’s encryption is an arms race as digital security experts try to hold off hackers’ attempts to break open user data. But there’s a new tech on the horizon that even the NSA recognizes as crucial to protect against: quantum computing, which is expected to dramatically speed up attempts to crack some commonly-used cryptographic schemes. To get ahead of the game, Google is testing new digital security setups on single-digit populations of Chrome users.

Quantum computing is such a potential threat because it can do many more simultaneous calculations than current computers. Modern binary bits can only be in two states when electric current is run through them: 0 or 1. But the ambiguous nature of the quantum state means its elemental units (known as “qubits”) could be in either state at a time, so two could potentially be in four orientations at one time: 00, 01, 10 or 11. That ambiguity is exponential, so three qubits could be in eight at a time, and so on.

Security experts aren’t just concerned that quantum computers’ higher speed means faster rates of cryptography-cracking: They’re worried that future hacking methods could come back to today’s encrypted data and pry it open. But that’s in the future: as Wired points out, crypto experts say you would need a quantum computer with hundreds of thousands of qubits, and IBM’s only has five.