News Tagged "Washington Post"
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Hackers Used a Fish Tank to Break into a Vegas Casino. We’re All in Trouble.
Bruce Schneier’s new book, Click Here to Kill Everybody, explains the security risks of a new world of household devices connected to the Internet. I asked him what the risks are, why they are so serious and what their consequences are for politics.
HF: Technology has created a hyper-connected world. How does this lead to vulnerabilities?
BS: As we connect more things to the Internet, they can affect each other. This is generally a goodness, but it leads to vulnerabilities in unexpected ways. First, vulnerabilities in one thing can affect another thing. We saw this last year when a major Vegas casino’s high-roller database was hacked through—and I am not making this up—its Internet-connected fish tank…
Computer Scientists Break Cellular Phone Privacy Code; Team's Effort Deals Setback to Industry
Computer scientists have broken a crucial code that protects the new generation of cellular phones from certain kinds of eavesdropping.
The news is a blow to those who would promote digital cellular telephones as highly secure systems, said Bruce Schneier of Minneapolis-based Counterpane Systems, one of the cryptographers who broke the code.
Breaking the code takes just minutes on a powerful desktop computer, Schneier said.
Schneier and his colleagues, John Kelsey of Counterpane and David Wagner from the University of California-Berkeley, said they broke one of three encryption systems used in the new generation of digital cellular phones. It is the scrambler that keeps eavesdroppers from being able to hear the signals sent from a telephone to the network, and is important for concealing any message punched into the telephone’s keypad. This includes access codes for using long-distance cards, entering credit card numbers, voice mail codes and more…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.