Two articles on the Brand Killer Robots blog drew my attention. Not because the data offered anything new, but that Stephen Ryan was able to create a bot to clearly show that insiders, employees, and former employees are the most likely to launch cyber attacks.
Raps BOT : Predicts Insider Cyber Terrorism Threat HIGH
Raps Bot : Sniper Attack Methods – Number 1 Cyber Terrorism Threat
I guess we all now need to build a Faraday Room instead of a Safe Room or Bomb Shelter — EMP Attack Would Decimate America and The Great Storm: Solar Tempest of 1859 Revealed. Damn, I thought I was going to get a week-end off this year.
Eight of the twenty-five hijackers from 9/11 were engineers, and the guy that attempted to blow up the airliner this Christmas (AKA Underpants Bomber) was also an engineer. For a good read on why so many engineers want to blow themselves up, go to the Slate Magazine article by Benjamin Popper.
During a recent project I came across an interesting study about the vulnerability of hotels from Cornell’s Center for Hospitality Research which finds that safety and security equipment in U.S. hotels varies dramatically by size, location, and overall hotel class.
For more on hotel Wi-Fi security in hotels, check out Dan Lohrman’s blog post and Hotel Network Security: A Study of the Computer Networks in U.S. Hotels also from Cornell.
An article entitled, Study: Terror attacks on hotels surge since 9/11, refers to a STRATFOR study entitled, Special Security Report: The Militant Threat to Hotels.
Terrorist interest groups lobbying against waiting period on IEG (improvised exploding garments).
Have you ever wondered how people are molded into suicide bombers, and why some people consider such pathetic creatures to be martyrs?
Suicidal fanaticism is not a new, nor is it solely an Arab or Muslim, phenomena. For example, on 4 June 1913, British suffragette Emily Wilding Davison threw herself in front of the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby, becoming a martyr for the women’s suffrage movement. Even that honourable cause, led by respectable people, produced a suicidal fanatic. Even though her reckless fanaticism nearly killed the jockey, she was revered and heralded as a martyr due to her deranged act.
The key concept is that she committed suicide for the movement, just as the Muslim fanatics do for any number of Islamic movements or causes. Hoffer’s [asa link]0060505915[/asa] explains the manipulation followers of a mass movement often experience and how such devious influence may trick people into doing things contrary to normal human nature.
Conrad’s [asa link]0451530500[/asa] explores the characters of a group of pathetic individuals plotting to blow-up the Greenwich Observatory. The motives and characters of the agent provocateur, bomb maker, and the unwitting suicide bomber are particularly germane to our time.
Updike’s [asa link]0345493915[/asa] is derivative of The Secret Agent, but set in today’s America. The would-be bomber’s empty emotional life allows his Imam to manipulate him into the suicidal mission. This plausible scenario is chilling when one considers the opportunities such people present to the likes of bin Laden.
Twitter news about the terrorist attacks every few seconds, at Mumbai, Bombay, #Mumbai, and @BreakingNewz.
The Wikipedia page about these attacks features a picture of a gun-toting attackers and is becomining the clearing house for information about the attacks just as it did for the Virginia Tech shooting. In the Virgina Tech shooting over 8000 amendments to the Wikipedia article were posted in 2 weeks.
The US authorities demand that everybody entering their country have a passport and identity documents compliant with their security standards, but when it comes to their own passports, they have a much lower security standard than they demand of other countries.
The blank passports travel to Europe where a microchip is inserted in the back cover and then onto Thailand where they are fitted with a radio antenna. The Netherlands company that makes the covers for the passport said in October that China stole the technology for the microchips, the Times said.
The Government Printing Office’s decision to export the work has proved lucrative, allowing the agency to book more than $100 million in recent profits by charging the State Department more money for blank passports than it actually costs to make them, according to interviews with federal officials and documents obtained by The Times.
Researchers at Purdue University are working with the state of Indiana to develop a system that would use a network of cell phones to detect and track radiation to help prevent terrorist attacks with radiological “dirty bombs” and nuclear weapons.
Such a system could blanket the nation with millions of cell phones equipped with radiation sensors able to detect even light residues of radioactive material. Because cell phones already contain global positioning locators, the network of phones would serve as a tracking system, said physics professor Ephraim Fischbach. Fischbach is working with Jere Jenkins, director of Purdue’s radiation laboratories within the School of Nuclear Engineering…
Tiny solid-state radiation sensors are commercially available. The detection system would require additional circuitry and would not add significant bulk to portable electronic products, Fischbach said.
The mobile telephone has become a modern-day slave bracelet for so many people, now it might also become a national security appliance.
This seems like an interesting gadget. There is nothing I hate more than investigating cargo thefts.
It can be programmed to stop a drunk or unauthorized driver from starting a vehicle, for example, or detect and shut down a truck that has been hijacked, locking the thief inside and alerting its owners.