Those who know me know I have a problems with the notion of security through obscurity — the idea that one can achieve some measure of real security by hiding the item or knowledge which needs to be protected. As a security measure, obscurity has been around since man first hid from a predator. It [...]
For the past couple of weeks some friends and colleagues and I have been discussing a CNN story on the vulnerability of SCADA controlled generators. The story fed to CNN by the DHS is that power generators, under SCADA control, can be destroyed via cyber attack by telling or tricking the PLC into over-cycling the [...]
The worldwide lack of potable water is one of the least covered crisis facing man. Michael Pritchard, of Ipswitch UK, decided to do something about it after watching coverage of the great tsunami of 2004 and hurricane Katrina in 2005. Mr. Pritchard was shocked that people had to wait for days to receive potable drinking [...]
There are days when I wonder if I have stumbled into some poorly written parody of reality. In assessing the greatest threats that law enforcement will face in the future, Australian Federal Police Commissioner, Mick Keelty announced this week that the greatest future threat we face is . . . wait for it . [...]
A recent article int the NY Times has revealed that the Department of Homeland Security is funding the development of software to sniff out anti-government bias in the written word. The software will be first used on foreign and domestic newspapers to, presumably, detect those who are disloyal, and thus a threat to US security. [...]
One of the under reported stories of the week concerns the latest major security flaw in the Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine. The folks over at Freedom to Tinker have discovered that the cover lock (which controls access to the memory slot) on the AccuVote-TS is the same as that used on mini-bars, filing cabinets, and [...]
