Interesting essay about how Israel regulates encryption: …the Israeli encryption control mechanisms operate without directly legislating any form of encryption-key depositories, built-in back or front door access points, or other similar requirements. Instead, Israel’s system emphasizes smooth initial licensing processes and cultivates government-private sector collaboration.
There’s a new paper on a low-cost TEMPEST attack against PC cryptography: We demonstrate the extraction of secret decryption keys from laptop computers, by nonintrusively measuring electromagnetic emanations for a few seconds from a distance of 50 cm. The attack can be executed using cheap and readily-available equipment: a consumer-grade radio receiver or a Software Defined Radio USB dongle.
Last weekend, the Sunday Times published a front-page story (full text here ), citing anonymous British sources claiming that both China and Russia have copies of the Snowden documents. It’s a terrible article, filled with factual inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims about both Snowden’s actions and the damage caused by his disclosure, and others have thoroughly refuted the story. I want to focus on the actual question: Do countries like China and Russia have copies of the Snowden documents
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I don’t know enough about the methodology to judge it, but it’s interesting : In total, 64 cities are categorised as ‘extreme risk’ in Verisk Maplecroft’s new Global Alerts Dashboard (GAD), an online mapping and data portal that logs and analyses every reported terrorism incident down to levels of 100m² worldwide. Based on the intensity and frequency of attacks in the 12 months following February 2014, combined with the number and severity of incidents in the previous five years, six cities in Iraq top the ranking. Over this period, the country’s capital, Baghdad, suffered 380 terrorist attacks resulting in 1141 deaths and 3654 wounded, making it the world’s highest risk urban centre, followed by Mosul, Al Ramadi, Ba’qubah, Kirkuk and Al Hillah
The vigorous debate after the Sony Pictures breach pitted the Obama administration against many of us in the cybersecurity community who didn’t buy Washington’s claim that North Korea was the culprit. What’s both amazing — and perhaps a bit frightening — about that dispute over who hacked Sony is that it happened in the first place. But what it highlights is the fact that we’re living in a world where we can’t easily tell the difference between a couple of guys in a basement apartment and the North Korean government with an estimated $10 billion military budget
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