In 2016, Lewis University launched its Master of Science in Computer Science degree. The degree includes three concentrations: Software Engineering, Intelligent Systems, and Cybersecurity. That last concentration in Cybersecurity raised some eyebrows. We had been…
Seemingly every week brings another high-profile threat to our online lives. This week, Spectre and Meltdown captured all the attention, and for good reason. Unlike most of the problems we’ve heard about over the years,…
A group known as New World Hacking launched a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack against the BBC and Donald Trump’s campaign website this week. The Trump site was down for about an hour, while…
I wrote earlier this week about the possibility that a power outage in the Ukraine on December 23 had been caused by malware. It turns out that the outage was indeed caused by a cyber…
Microsoft’s operating systems offer two kinds of encryption: device encryption, which encrypts an entire disk, and Bitlocker, which offers the user a chance to configure how the encryption should be done and where it should…
A new piece of malware that encrypts a victim’s files until the victim pays a ransom to decrypt them has surfaced. This new threat is called Ransom32, and it was written in Javascript, a cross-platform language…
A power outage in the Ukraine appears to have been caused by a cyber attack. Security researchers are currently investigating the incident, which occurred in the eastern part of the country on December 23. It is…
Authentication is an essential component of protecting critical resources. It comes in two forms. Data-origin authentication aims to assert that data has arrived intact from its expected source. Peer-entity authentication seeks to assert that the…
Sometimes design mistakes are so dumb that, if you’re conspiracy-minded, you wonder if they were made on purpose. Here’s an example. HTC, makers of the One Max smartphone, decided to leave users’ fingerprints in a world-readable,…
It turns out that Microsoft has been right all along, at least when it comes to software updates. Android has it very, very wrong. And Apple, in its quest to rule everything, got it right out…