Ramona Fricosu, the woman ordered by a court to decrypt the contents of her laptop until February 21, revealed through the voice of her lawyer that she might have forgotten the password to the encrypted drive.
According to Wired, the defendant hasn’t taken this position in court, but her attorney states that people forget their passwords all the time, especially since in this case, the encryption wasn’t set up by Fricosu herself.
Criminal hackers have found a way round the latest generation of online banking security devices given out by banks, the BBC has learned.
After logging in to the bank's real site, account holders are being tricked by the offer of training in a new "upgraded security system". Money is then moved out of the account but this is hidden from the user.
At CES, Singapore-based ST Electronics was showing off a new security device that can be installed in nearly any notebook computer to protect its data from prying eyes—Digisafe DiskCrypt, a hard-disk enclosure that turns any 1.8-inch micro-SATA device into removable and fully encrypted storage. The enclosure, which is the size of a 2.5" drive, can be used as a drop-in replacement for existing drives.
Although we feel we know cash intimately, let's take a deeper look at some of its attributes. First of all, it's represented by a physical object: either a banknote or a coin.
If you buy something, you hand over that physical thing to the seller. It leaves your possession and enters theirs. Your net cash worth is reduced by the amount of cash you've handed over.
The New Year is upon us, and you might be partaking in the tradition of making a resolution for the coming year. This year, why not make a resolution to protect your data privacy with one of the most powerful tools available? Commit to full disk encryption on each of your computers.
Taking inspiration from Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, a US startup has fused a USB flash drive with a ‘Cryptex’ device, a metal cylinder that can only be opened by setting the correct combination on a rotating barrel.
The latest Crypteks (notice the different spelling) is not the first device of its kind – designs have been circulating on the Internet since the Da Vinci code resurrected what is probably an older idea – but it does look like the most interesting to date.
German boffins have pulled off a successful attack on HDCP copy protection – using cheap hardware and a lot of clever coding.
Intel's HDCP (high-bandwidth digital content protection) allows the encrypted transfer of high definition video signals via DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort and other connectors and between TVs and Blue-ray discs or set-top boxes. The HDCP master key was leaked last year but there was no easy way to exploit this.
During recent weeks we have observed several interesting publications which have a direct relation to an investigation we worked on recently. On one hand there was a Certificate Authority being revoked by Mozilla, Microsoft and Google (Chrome), on the other hand there was the disclosure of a malware attack by Mikko Hypponen (FSecure) using a government issued certificate signed by the same Certificate Authority. That case however is not self-contained and a whole range of malicious software had been signed with valid certificates.
Encryption is one of the few "defiant" technologies still available to the great unwashed masses.
I call it defiant because it runs counter to a growing demand by governments to dismantle people's right to privacy and counter to their demands to have access to any and all information they might want.
Kiwicon opened with a software engineering talk which was intensely focused - a case study of a single-line bug in a single source file in a single module in a 70MBbyte programming language distro.
The talk, by Kiwi-turned-Northern-Californian coder Geoff Cant, was entitled The Erlang SSH story: from bug to key recovery. Geoff works for ngmoko:), a platform for building social networking interactions into your online games. (The smiley is part of the company name.)
