researchers

According to Facebook's head of security Alex Stamos, the security industry needs to do more to solve problems that affect ordinary people in their everyday lives. He says researchers are often too obsessed with technical detail because they lack ... empathy. Stamos spoke at Black Hat, a conference that brings together security professionals, researchers, self-described hackers and those with an interest in the topic. (Source: bbc.co.uk ) He said the security community had proven justified in many of its warnings about flaws in systems and networks, but that it hadn't done enough to find ... (view more)

Russian-backed hackers appear to have the ability to remotely shut down power stations, researchers claim. However, the cyber weapon appears to only have been successfully deployed once so far. Two companies, Dragos Inc and ESET, have revealed their ... analysis of malware that was used in an attack on a transmission station in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, last December. The outage lasted for an hour and blacked out buildings that normally use 20 percent of the city's electricity. (Source: washingtonpost.com ) Malware Easily Customized The researchers say the malware, which they've dubbed ... (view more)

Motion sensors in smartphones could give away your lock code to hackers according to new research. But practical limitations mean related attacks might have to be specifically targeted. Researchers at Newcastle University explored the idea that ... tools such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, compasses and GPS chips in phones could reveal more detail than users realize. The tools are used for a variety of functions such as location tracking, fitness tracking and gesture control such as a user turning a phone face down to instantly switch it to "do not disturb" mode. Their theory was that ... (view more)

Security researchers say hackers could turn people's headphones into a microphone for surreptitious remote listening. However, the method has enough limitations that it shouldn't be a major concern for most users. The method, shown off by ... researchers at Ben Guiron University in Israel, takes advantage of a very simple element of engineering. That is that the process by which a microphone turns speech into an electronic signal is effectively the same as that by which earphones turn a speaker into sound, just with the process reversed. According to the researchers, that's a security ... (view more)

A new phone app is said to help detect earthquakes and provide quicker warnings than is currently possible. The 'MyShake app' has many limitations, but could theoretically still save lives. The app uses the accelerometer that's built into most ... modern phones. It's a small gadget that measures movement in the phone along three axes (left-right, up-down, back-forth) and powers all sorts of features, including fitness tools and the way that displays automatically rotate and resize if you turn the phone from landscape to portrait or vice versa. The idea of MyShake is to constantly monitor ... (view more)

Apple is making its technology available to medical researchers to conduct mass studies. Participation is entirely voluntary, and the company insists user privacy will be protected. The technology is called ResearchKit, and it's a set of tools ... available to researchers to make use of data gathered by smartphones that could relate to health and medicine. As well as collecting data from Apple products such as the iPhone, ResearchKit will be able to use data from fitness gadgets from other firms such as Fitbit. Using ResearchKit, researchers will be able to develop iPhone apps, even if they don ... (view more)

Computer researchers have created an 'airborne' computer virus that takes advantage of WiFi (wireless Internet) routers. The point of the study is to highlight the many ways in which wireless routers are open to abuse. The research studied wireless ... access points, and was completed by the University of Liverpool. Access points are electronic devices that relay information from a local wireless network to another (typically the Internet). For example: a PC or laptop connected to a wireless router (which is then connected to the Internet) would be considered an access point. The goal of ... (view more)