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Summary:At the WinHEC conference in China today, Microsoft showed off a new biometric authentication feature called Windows Hello. The ambitious technology, which uses fingerprint and iris recognition to replace passwords, will debut in Windows 10 devices later this year.
For years, biometric authentication has been a sci-fi staple. Bits and pieces of biometric technology already exist in popular technology, most notably the TouchID fingerprint sensors used on late-model iPhones and iPads.
With Windows 10, coming later this fall, Microsoft plans to go big with biometric technology. The new OS will introduce system support for biometric authentication, the company says, “using your face, iris, or fingerprint to unlock your devices … with technology that is much safer than traditional passwords.”
At the WinHEC conference in China today, Microsoft executives showed off the new feature, called Windows Hello. At first glance, it sounds like Microsoft’s response to TouchID — biometric authentication that can use a fingerprint reader, illuminated IR sensor, or other biometric sensor to provide instant access to a Windows 10 device. Show your face or touch a finger, Microsoft says, and you’ll be
There are four key metrics for evaluating computer security solutions; TrustPipe provides greater than 10X improvements across all four:
October 29, 2014
By Joel Rosenblatt
The holiday season is filled with opportunities for the Bad Guys to take advantage of people who are filled with the holiday spirit, out and about having a good time and letting their guard down. Since I work at a university, I sometimes get asked to pass along tips to increase the awareness of how easy it is to be taken advantage of. Here are some of my “Seasons Greetings:”
As students return to school, technology goes with them. That technology—and the data generated by it—is valuable not simply as a means for getting school work done, but also as entertainment for those brief hours between one assignment and the next. It’s for this reason that it pays to plan for disaster. With a single massive power burst, storage media that suddenly heads south, or interaction with a light-fingered ne’er-do-well, the technology your student depends on can vanish. Take these five tips to heart, however, and the loss of a device or data need not be catastrophic.
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At WWDC14 Apple announced that it was opening up Touch ID to all developers.AgileBits, developer popular password vault 1Password, has demonstrated several promising new applications of the biometric fingerprint sensor built into the home button on the iPhone 5s.
In a blog post and accompanying video, AgileBits shows how Touch ID can be used to:
Make no mistake about it, this is revolutionary. These three features alone make Touch ID a viable and powerful security technology, a generation ahead of the anemic unlock code and App Store purchases that Touch ID is limited to today.
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Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols for Between the Lines |
It’s a common scene from TV: Our hero sneaks into the villain’s office, plugs in a USB stick and — flash! — all the secret plans to conquer Chicago are sucked down into the thumb-drive. The only fiction is how fast it takes to download data. In the real world, office data thieves walk out with stolen data everyday on their flash drives.
It could be worse. USB sticks can also carry malware. Or, as SRLabs security researchers Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell propose to show at Black Hat, an ordinary USB pen drive can be turned into an automated hacking tool.
The base problem, according to the pair, is “USB has become so commonplace that we rarely worry about its security implications. USB sticks undergo the occasional virus scan, but we consider USB to be otherwise perfectly safe — until now.”
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(Reuters) – E-commerce company eBay Inc said hackers stole email addresses, birthdays and other identity information between late February and early March in a data breach that may have affected a “large number” of accounts.
In the latest major cyber attack at a U.S. company, eBay said it had found no evidence of unauthorized access to financial or credit card information, which is stored separately in encrypted formats.
Thanks to Ed Rudel for lead
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By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols for Networking |
Heartbleed really is that bad. Your user-ids, your passwords, your credit-card numbers, everything you place online is potentially in play for hackers. You can not fool around with this.
So, as I said earlier, get ready to change all your passwords. Yes, every last damn one of them. Were your favorite sites vulnerable? You can check specific sites with the Heartbleed test, LastPass Heartbleed checker, or the Qualys SSL Labs test. The first two just check on Heartbleed while the last checks for other possible Secure-Socket Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) and awards sites a grade from A (the best) to F (failure).
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