Though we now think we are protected by fingerprint readers, these are also prone to cyberattacks. If you think your fingerprint is unique, think again. Masterprints, digitally altered fingerprints that work like a master key, have been discovered by researchers for New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering. With these masterprints, one can unlock up...
Author: Emerald Knox (Emerald Knox)
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Security and Privacy in Cyber-Physical Systems: A Survey of Surveys
Jairo Giraldo, Esha Sarkar, Alvaro Cardenas, Michail Maniatakos and Murat Kantarcioglu Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are engineered systems combining computation, communications, and physical resources. Over the last decade—alongside technical advances in CPS—a vibrant and active community of security and privacy researchers have proposed and developed a mature research agenda addressing fundamental problems and risks of CPS...
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New Study Exposes Vulnerability of Smartphone’s Fingerprint Scanner
One of the prime reasons why phone users prefer fingerprint scanner-enabled smartphones is because of the sense of privacy and security that it offers. Or so we thought … The new findings have been released by Nasir Memon, a professor in the department of computer science and engineering at New York University’s Tandon School of...
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Under the Shadow of Sunshine: Understanding and Detecting Bulletproof Hosting on Legitimate Service Provider Networks
Sumayah Alrwais, Xiaojing Liao , Xianghang Mi , Peng Wang , XiaoFeng Wang , Feng Qian , Raheem Beyah and Damon McCoy BulletProof Hosting (BPH) services provide criminal actors with technical infrastructure that is resilient to complaints of illicit activities, which serves as a basic building block for streamlining numerous types of attacks.In this paper,...
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Can Big Data Analysis Swing a Political Election? (Video)
As nearly everything in our lives transitions from the real to the digital world, the more those things can — and are — being tracked. Every like, tweet, search and swipe ours is a piece of that digital data mosaic that makes up our online life. But with that massive amount of information, companies, advertisers...
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Tools for Automated Analysis of Cybercriminal Markets
Rebecca S. Portnoff, Sadia Afroz, Greg Durrett, Jonathan K. Kummerfeld, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Damon McCoy, Kirill Levchenko and Vern Paxson. Underground forums are widely used by criminals to buy and sell a host of stolen items, datasets, resources, and criminal services. These forums contain important resources for understanding cybercrime. However, the number of forums, their size, and the domain expertise required...
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To Catch a Ratter: Monitoring the Behavior of Amateur DarkComet RAT Operators in the Wild
Brown Farinholt , Mohammad Rezaeirad , Paul Pearce , Hitesh Dharmdasani, Haikuo Yin Stevens Le Blondk , Damon McCoy, Kirill Levchenko Remote Access Trojans (RATs) give remote attackers interactive control over a compromised machine. Unlike largescale malware such as botnets, a RAT is controlled individually by a human operator interacting with the compromised machine remotely....
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WannaCry Ransomware Attack Illustrates Need for Evolution in Cybersecurity Norms
Individuals and institutions affected by the WannaCry ransomware attack face a Hobson’s choice—the malicious software (malware) encrypts a user’s documents while the decryption keys remain in the hands of the cybercriminals. Victims of the attack can either pay the hackers for the release of their files, feeding the profit motive that generates attacks like this...
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DeepMasterPrint: Generating Fingerprints for Presentation Attacks
Philip Bontrager, Julian Togelius and Nasir Memon We present two related methods for creating MasterPrints, synthetic fingerprints that a fingerprint verification system identifies as many different people. Both methods start with training a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) on a set of real fingerprint images. The generator network is then used to search for images that...
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New Hacking Threats: Fingerprint Reader Vulnerabilities and Sophisticated Ransomware
Researchers for New York University’s (N.Y.U.) Tandon School of Engineering discovered masterprints, digitally altered fingerprints that could match many people’s fingers…”If I have this glove or fake hand with these master prints on it then I can unlock say 25, 30, 40 percent of phones,” Professor Nasir Memon of N.Y.U. Tandon said.