Kyt Dotson
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The Anonymous Impact: Hacktivism in 2011 Exceeded Criminal Breaches
While 2011 wasn’t the beginning of hacktivism, it was when the global media caught fire with attention for the phenomenon—and, according to a report [PDF link] released by American mobile company Verizon, 2011 is also the year that security breaches and data losses due to hactivism surpassed those from actual criminal enterprise. Last year’s cybercrime ...
How Can We Use Big Data to Enable Better Cybersecurity?
The path to 2011 has been filled with numerous new security threats—and some old ones that have learned new tricks—as the Internet continues to expand, computers get faster, storage gets smarter, and connectivity increases these threats will continue to evolve and security must do so as well. This is the classic Red Queen’s race and ...
8,000 Student E-mails Leaked in Loan Company Security Blunder
It’s not always the hackers that you need to worry about: ordinary human error can do just as much damage. This is the moral of a story coming out of England from a student loans facilitator named Student Finance England who inadvertently leaked the details of over 8,000 students during a mass e-mail distribution blunder. ...
The Power of Augmented Reality and Gamification to Get Better Pictures
Nowadays smartphones and devices with cameras embedded are ubiquitous and users take pictures of almost everything—they snap shots of their everyday life, buildings, and landmarks—and this can be extremely useful for the big data and visualization crowd. After all, everything a tourist photographs that goes online can be used to produce high fidelity collages of ...
Duqu Mystery Programming Language Solved
It’s been a strange road to understanding the Trojan-worm hybrid malware Duqu that started spreading numerous spybots and rootkits across the Internet last year. It was even caught exploiting an unknown bug in Microsoft Word in order to get a beachhead on the computer to download spyware. This month, security researchers at Kaspersky Labs broke ...
Social Payment Startup Venmo Adds Instant Bank Payments to Their Arsenal
The ability to use your smartphone as a wallet is an extremely useful addition to mobility and even helps reduce the number of cards we have to carry and helps alleviate the number of credit cards and payment cards we need to carry (just don’t lose your phone.) We’ve seen a few different payment vendors ...
Microsoft Demonstrates “Beamatron” Augmented Reality via Kinect-Projector Duo
As a device that “sees” the world, Microsoft’s Kinect peripheral has been providing a lot of potential methods for delivering augmented reality. In this particular demo, Andy Wilson from Microsoft Research shows off the “Beamatron”—a Kinect attached to a motorized pan-tilt armature affixed to a projector (which he says, “You might find one of these ...
Malware Infiltrating Anonymous Not So Different from Any Other Trojan Trickery
Wednesday, an operating system designed around a flavor of Linux was released by an apparent cell of Anonymous accordingly loaded with anonymity tools, hacking suites, and privacy software—but it also potentially came with a side of Trojans and malware—and this brought Gizmodo’s Sam Biddle to ask “Is Anonymous Spinning out of Control?” The presence of ...
Creators of Wizard101 to the 2012 Keynote Digital Kids Conference in April
The massively-multiplayer online (MMO) gaming industry has proven itself to be a powerful vector for pulling people together to play video games and for the enterprise to capably make money. Families have always been a large consumer of entertainment and MMOs may prove to be no obstacle to this factor of everyday life, as a ...
Hacker Group The Consortium “Exposes” 72,000 Users from Porn Site Digital Playground
If there’s anything that we’ve learned from 2011, it’s that hackers like pornography… Or at least they like to hack into pornography websites, steal the usernames and passwords, personal information, and credit card numbers. This is possibly because as an industry, these websites attract a great deal of users and also possibly it’s because they’re ...