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Archive for the ‘security’ category: Page 84

Jan 24, 2020

Pandemic simulation exercise spotlights massive preparedness gap

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, food, health, security, sustainability, terrorism

Circa 2019 Event 201, hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, envisions a fast-spreading coronavirus with a devastating impact.

Back in 2001, it was a smallpox outbreak, set off by terrorists in U.S. shopping malls. This fall, it was a SARS-like virus, germinating quietly among pig farms in Brazil before spreading to every country in the world. With each fictional pandemic Johns Hopkins experts have designed, the takeaway lesson is the same: We are nowhere near prepared.

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Jan 21, 2020

Record-breaking terahertz laser beam

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, security

Terahertz radiation is used for security checks at airports, for medical examinations and also for quality checks in industry. However, radiation in the terahertz range is extremely difficult to generate. Scientists at TU Wien have now succeeded in developing a terahertz radiation source that breaks several records: it is extremely efficient, and its spectrum is very broad—it generates different wavelengths from the entire terahertz range. This opens up the possibility of creating short radiation pulses with extremely high radiation intensity. The new terahertz technology has now been presented in the journal Nature Communications.

The “Terahertz Gap” Between Lasers and Antennas

“Terahertz has very useful properties,” says Claudia Gollner from the Institute of Photonics at TU Wien. “It can easily penetrate many materials, but unlike X-rays, it is harmless because it is not ionizing radiation.”

Jan 19, 2020

FBI Takes Down Site With 12 Billion Stolen Records

Posted by in category: security

Turkey gets Wikipedia back, Mayor Pete loses his cyberguy, and more of the week’s top security news.

Jan 16, 2020

Special sunglasses, license-plate dresses: How to be anonymous in the age of surveillance

Posted by in categories: security, surveillance

Cory Doctorow’s sunglasses are seemingly ordinary. But they are far from it when seen on security footage, where his face is transformed into a glowing white orb.

At his local credit union, bemused tellers spot the curious sight on nearby monitors and sometimes ask, “What’s going on with your head?” said Doctorow, chuckling.

The frames of his sunglasses, from Chicago-based eyewear line Reflectacles, are made of a material that reflects the infrared light found in surveillance cameras and represents a fringe movement of privacy advocates experimenting with clothes, ornate makeup and accessories as a defense against some surveillance technologies.

Jan 15, 2020

Researchers demonstrate first stable semiconductor neutron detector

Posted by in categories: materials, security

Homeland Security might soon have a new tool to add to its arsenal.

Researchers at Northwestern University and Argonne National Laboratory have developed a new material that opens doors for a new class of neutron detectors.

With the ability to sense smuggled , highly efficient neutron detectors are critical for national security. Currently, there are two classes of detectors which either use helium gas or flashes of light. These detectors are very large—sometimes the size of a wall.

Jan 15, 2020

National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, food, habitats, health, security, space

Location: Manhattan, KS

NBAF - National Agor-Defense Facility

The National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) will be a state-of-the-art biocontainment laboratory for the study of diseases that threaten both America’s animal agricultural industry and public health. DHS S&T is building the facility to standards that fulfill the mission needs of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) which will own, manage and operate (PDF, 16 pgs., 165 KB) the NBAF once construction and commissioning activities are complete. The NBAF will strengthen our nation’s ability to conduct research, develop vaccines, diagnose emerging diseases, and train veterinarians. DHS S&T will leverage the facility as a national asset to fulfill homeland security mission needs.

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Jan 15, 2020

Lawmakers bussed to Forbes Field for closed-door security meeting

Posted by in categories: drones, security

Found this article being passed around amongst some of the Colorado/Nebraska drone sightings speculators…


TOPEKA, Kan. (KSNT) – All committee meetings were canceled Tuesday afternoon and all Kansas House members were called to the Kansas Air National Guard for a meeting with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Kansas Deputy Attorney General Jay Scott Emler sent a letter to Speaker Ron Ryckman Tuesday saying that the DHS briefing should be given in a closed caucus.

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Jan 15, 2020

Windows 10 Has a Security Flaw So Severe the NSA Disclosed It

Posted by in categories: privacy, security

In a shift toward transparency, the National Security Agency announced a bug that could have left over 900 million PCs vulnerable to attack.

Jan 12, 2020

This autonomous security drone is designed to guard your home

Posted by in categories: drones, habitats, robotics/AI, security

One of the new products unveiled at CES this year is a new kind of home security system — one that includes drones to patrol your property, along with sensors designed to mimic garden light and a central processor to bring it all together.

Sunflower Labs debuted their new Sunflower Home Awareness System, which includes the eponymous Sunflowers (motion and vibration sensors that look like simple garden lights but can populate a map to show you cars, people and animals on or near your property in real time); the Bee (a fully autonomous drone that deploys and flies on its own, with cameras on board to live-stream video); and the Hive (a charging station for the Bee, which also houses the brains of the operation for crunching all the data gathered by the component parts).

Roving aerial robots keeping tabs on your property might seem a tad dystopian, and perhaps even unnecessary, when you could maybe equip your estate with multiple fixed cameras and sensors for less money and with less complexity. But Sunflower Labs thinks its security system is an evolution of more standard fare because it “learns and reacts to its surroundings,” improving over time.

Jan 11, 2020

Mozilla warns Firefox users to update after ‘targeted attacks’

Posted by in categories: computing, security

Mozilla has warned Firefox users to update their browser to the latest version after security researchers found a vulnerability that hackers were actively exploiting in “targeted attacks” against users.

The vulnerability, found by Chinese security company Qihoo 360, was found in Firefox’s just-in-time compiler. The compiler is tasked with speeding up performance of JavaScript to make websites load faster. But researchers found that the bug could allow malicious JavaScript to run outside of the browser on the host computer.

In practical terms, that means an attacker can quietly break into a victim’s computer by tricking the victim into accessing a website running malicious JavaScript code.

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