security

Just outside the small town of Rheinbach, the German army has begun preparations for a new kind of war. Following on the heels of attacks against the Internet infrastructure of Estonia, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, as well as a large scale hacking attack by China against a number of European countries, the German army, or Bundeswehr, has established its first unit dedicated solely to cyber war.

The GroundBot is a spherical sentry designed to roll up to 6 mph through just about anything—mud, sand, snow and even water. Two gyroscopically steadied wide-angle cameras and a suite of sensors give remote operators a real-time, 360-degree view of the landscape, letting them zoom in on prowlers or detect gas leaks, radioactivity and biohazards.

Stefan Savage, a professor at UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering, can duplicate a key for you -- using just a photo of the original. As part of an experiment in security with students, the computer science prof took a photo of a key with a telephoto lens mounted on the roof of the UC campus 200 feet away, and used it to create a duplicate of the key.

On the eve of Election Day, Americans are busy debating the issues, everything from health care and the economy to the war in Iraq and global warming. But there's a vital issue few citizens or politicians seem to be talking much about, though they should be: cyber-security.

Last week, Google released a beta application that provides walking directions in major cities such as New York, San Francisco, and Minneapolis. It's another sign that the search giant is getting even more specific about "organizing the world's information," right down to the sidewalk in front of your house. If you want to walk from your apartment in the suburbs to a restaurant downtown, Google will show you the best route with turn-by-turn directions you can print out or follow on your smartphone.

Identity theft used to involve someone rifling through your garbage. But now more than half a million laptops—full of tax returns and love letters—are stolen every year, estimates computer insurer Safeware. And even if your computer never leaves your sight, hackers can weasel into it over the Internet. Here are three technologies that will safeguard your digital data, whether it's on an office desktop or a stolen laptop.

As if the security in airports and controls at border crossings weren't slow and intrusive enough, governments around the world are quietly passing laws to allow them to search the contents of your laptop and other electronic devices, like iPods and cellphones. A United States court last month gave border agents carte blanche to hold a laptop for days and even copy its entire contents. The UK government has given its agents authority to search computers at its borders for pornography. But in what may be the most baffling and cumbersome move of all, the US, Canada, UK, and other EU nations are working behind closed doors on a new trade agreement which could turn border agents into the copyright police.

Over the long weekend, the servers of the Internet TV site Revision3.com were brought down by what is called a "denial-of-service" attack (DoS)—one of the most common methods used to disrupt the operations of a Web site or server by flooding it with an overload of simultaneous connections. These attacks are not uncommon, but in a fascinating blog post written by Revision3's CEO Jim Louderback today, he reveals that the source of this particular attack was not a pimply basement hacker with a grudge, but a major anti-piracy organization called MediaDefender whose clients include all the major entertainment companies and the RIAA. The hitch? Revision3 is a perfectly legitimate business that does not deal in pirated content.

So much for scalping tickets. In a country where Big Brother is more than a myth, Chinese officials have taken technological steps to ensure only those who purchase tickets to the opening and closing ceremonies are allowed inside the Bird’s Nest in Beijing. RFID chips in each ticket will include photos, phone numbers, email addresses and passport data ensuring the $720 face value isn’t increased on the street.

Terahertz radiation, or T-rays, can see through clothing, paper, cardboard and numerous other materials, so scientists have been touting their potential for years. A T-ray-based imager could spot concealed weapons hidden under a person's clothes or even identify tumors without inducing any bad side effects.

Google's CAPTCHA appears to have been cracked. On closer inspection, however, it seems Russian spammers have solicited humans to do the solving and to pass those accounts on to the computers. Websense Threat is reporting that one out of every five attacks of this kind on Google has been successful. Why is this an alarming development? Let's take a look at the CAPTCHA in order to understand.

Researchers at Princeton have discovered that with a can of duster and a laptop, it takes only matter of minutes to crack most encryption software, including BitLocker, FileVault, dm-crypt and TrueCrypt. The weak link that makes this ridiculously simple hack possible is the DRAM chip. Heres why: Any time your computer is on, that chip contains the key used to access encrypted data on your hard drive. Once that chip loses power, the bits stored on it are supposed to disappear immediately. But thats not really what happens.

In 2006, David Holtzman decided to do an experiment. Holtzman, a security consultant and former intelligence analyst, was working on a book about privacy, and he wanted to see how much he could find out about himself from sources available to any tenacious stalker. So he did background checks. He pulled his credit file. He looked at Amazon.com transactions and his credit-card and telephone bills. He got his DNA analyzed and kept a log of all the people he called and e-mailed, along with the Web sites he visited.

Every single American bank note is printed at Bureau of Engraving and Printing facilities, with ink and on paper each made, separately, in only one factory in the world. And yet at any given time, there is at least $70 million worth of fake U.S. currency floating around, 75 percent of which is in $100 bills. In large part because of the advent of inexpensive scanners and printers, more and more fake bills are entering circulation: From 1997 to 2007, the amount of passed counterfeit bills nearly doubled, to $64.9 million.

What do you think happens when you connect your computer to the Internet? In less than an hour, it may not be yours anymore. While you're Googling your name and checking e-mail, a hacker, perhaps in Eastern Europe-let's call him Ivan-quietly takes over your machine. There are a dozen ways Ivan could do it, but he probably found you with a program he didn't get at Best Buy called a port scanner, which roams the Internet like a clumsy cat burglar, trying every doorknob until it locates one left unlocked.