New class of Malware will steal Behavioural Patterns

Computer scientists predict that a new generation of malware will mine social networks for people's private patterns of behavior.

It's not hard to find frightening examples of malware which steals personal information, sometimes for the purpose of making it public and at other times for profit. Details such as names, addresses and emails are hugely valuable for companies wanting to market their wares.

But there is another class of information associated with networks that is potentially much more valuable: the pattern of links between individuals and their behavior in the network--how often they email or call each other, how information spreads between them and so on.

Why is this more valuable? An email address associated with an individual who is at the hub of a vibrant social network is clearly more valuable to a marketing company than an email address at the edge of the network. Patterns of contact can also reveal how people are linked, whether they are in a relationship for example, whether they are students or executives, or whether they prefer celebrity gossip to tech news.

This information would allow a determined attacker to build a remarkably detailed picture of the lifestyle of any individual, a picture that would be far more useful than the basic demographic information that marketeers use today that consists of little more than sex, age and social grouping.

Today, Yaniv Altshuler at Ben Gurion University and a few pals argue that the value of this data makes it almost inevitable that malicious attackers will attempt to steal it. They point out that many companies already mine the pattern of links in their data for things like recommender systems.

"There is no reason to think that developers of malicious applications will not implement the same method and algorithms into future malware, or that they have not already started doing so," they say.

The idea would be to release some kind of malware that records the patterns of links in a network. This kind of malware will be very hard to detect, say Altshuler and co. They've studied the strategies that best mine behavioral pattern data from a real mobile phone network consisting of 800,000 links between 200,000 phones. (They call this type of attack "Stealing Reality".)

In conventional attacks, malware spreads most efficiently when the infection rate is high, and this maximises the amount of information it can steal. But it also makes the malware relatively easy to spot.

In a behavioral pattern attack, their surprising conclusion is that the most effective way of mining data is to have a low infection rate, so the malware spreads slowly. That's because it takes time to collect good information about an individual's behavior patterns. Also, a slow spread is less likely to be picked up by network administrators and antivirus software.

Perhaps the most worrying aspect of this new kind of theft is its potential impact. If malware steals your credit card details or online banking passwords, you can easily change them and this limits the damage.

But if a malicious attacker steals your behavioral patterns, there's almost nothing you can do. You can't change your network of friends or family, for example.

What's more, once this information is released, it is more or less impossible to contain--how would you ensure that every copy had been deleted?

The prospects for avoiding this new threat look bleak. As Altshuler and co point out: "History has shown that whenever something has a tangible value associated with it, there will always be those who try to malevolently 'game' the system for profit."

We'll almost certainly have to deal with this one sooner or later.

Study Links More Time Spent Sitting to Higher Risk of Death

A new study from American Cancer Society researchers finds it’s not just how much physical activity you get, but how much time you spend sitting that can affect your risk of death.

Researchers say time spent sitting was independently associated with total mortality, regardless of physical activity level. They conclude that public health messages should promote both being physically active and reducing time spent sitting. The study appears early online in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

To explore the association between sitting time and mortality, researchers examined the amount of time spent sitting and physical activity in relation to mortality between 1993 and 2006. They found that more leisure time spent sitting was associated with higher risk of mortality, particularly in women. Women who reported more than six hours per day of sitting were 37 percent more likely to die during the time period studied than those who sat fewer than 3 hours a day. Men who sat more than 6 hours a day were 18 percent more likely to die than those who sat fewer than 3 hours per day. The association remained virtually unchanged after adjusting for physical activity level. Associations were stronger for cardiovascular disease mortality than for cancer mortality.

When combined with a lack of physical activity, the association was even stronger. Women and men who both sat more and were less physically were 94% and 48% more likely, respectively, to die compared with those who reported sitting the least and being most active.

“Several factors could explain the positive association between time spent sitting and higher all-cause death rates,” said Dr. Patel. “Prolonged time spent sitting, independent of physical activity, has been shown to have important metabolic consequences, and may influence things like triglycerides, high density lipoprotein, cholesterol, fasting plasma glucose, resting blood pressure, and leptin, which are biomarkers of obesity and cardiovascular and other chronic diseases.”

Your Life: The Shirt-Pocket Movie

by Eirc A Taub

Think of it as Twitter with pictures. With a miniature wearable camcorder called the uCorder, you can document every mundane aspect of your life, from tying your shoes to going into the subway.
uCorder

The uCorder is about the size of a stick of gum. You can attach it to your belt, put it on a lanyard around your neck or slip it into a shirt pocket. Additional flash memory can be added to either of the two models, the $80 IRDC150 and $100 IRDC250, which come with 1GB and 2GB of memory, respectively, giving you either 36 or 72 minutes of video. The larger-capacity model can also double as a Web cam, using the included mount.

The uCorder records in 640 by 480 resolution using the AVI format. A built-in LED can help in low-light situations.

Playing videos from the device was simple. I just connected the uCorder to my Mac and double-clicked on the file that appeared on the desktop. In my tests, I found the video to be of good quality, but the audio was filled with lots of background noise and hum. While the device comes with a lanyard, don’t dangle the uCorder from it while you’re walking around, or you’ll be taking a lot of pictures of your shirt as the device twirls around your neck.

While the video quality was certainly acceptable watching in a small computer screen, don’t expect to use the uCorder to record life’s important events. Leaving a camcorder to find its own way around your neck or in your pocket will not make for the most compelling imagery. However, if you’re interested in recording a college lecture or the interaction between you and your date, it might do the trick.

The blurry lines of animated news

Cyberspace is filling up!

Internet users face regular “brownouts” that will freeze their computers as capacity runs out in cyberspace, according to research to be published later this year.
Experts predict that consumer demand, already growing at 60 per cent a year, will start to exceed supply from as early as next year because of more people working online and the soaring popularity of bandwidth-hungry websites such as YouTube and services such as the BBC’s iPlayer.

It will initially lead to computers being disrupted and going offline for several minutes at a time. From 2012, however, PCs and laptops are likely to operate at a much reduced speed, rendering the internet an “unreliable toy”.

When Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British scientist, wrote the code that transformed a private computer network into the world wide web in 1989, the internet appeared to be a limitless resource. However, a report being compiled by Nemertes Research, a respected American think-tank, will warn that the web has reached a critical point and that even the recession has failed to stave off impending problems.

In America, telecoms companies are spending £40 billion a year upgrading cables and supercomputers to increase capacity, while in Britain proposals to replace copper cabling across part of the network with fibre optic wires would cost at least £5 billion.
Engineers are already preparing for the worst. While some are planning a lightning-fast parallel network called “the grid”, others are building “caches”, private computer stations where popular entertainments are stored on local PCs rather than sent through the global backbone.

Telephone companies want to recoup escalating costs by increasing prices for “net hogs” who use more than their share of capacity.

Dude if you're gonna grow Weed at home don't have a burgular alarm that calls the police!

Police seized more than 40 marijuana plants, two pounds of cultivated marijuana, $10,000 in cash, handguns and rifles when they responded to a burglar alarm at the waterfront home of a local dentist.

Dr. Raymond Pacholec, 61, was charged with possession of more than 50 grams of marijuana, possession with intent to distribute and operating a marijuana growing facility, police said. Pacholec was released after posting $50,000 bail.

According to Detective Sgt. James J. Smith, at 8:27 a.m. police responded a burglar alarm at Pacholec's home at Bayview Avenue and Magnolia Drive. Officers John Sperber and Don Rowley walked through the house with Pacholec, but did not find a burglar. They did, however, notice a strong odor of raw marijuana, Smith said.

The officers also saw other indications of illegal drug use and took the doctor into custody. Police left and obtained a search warrant, Smith said. The Ocean County sheriff's canine unit and Criminalistics Investigations Unit assisted. The State Police Marijuana Eradication Unit assisted in taking the evidence into custody.

The subsequent search turned up additional evidence, Smith said.

Pacholec has a practice on Route 9 in the Bayville section.

"I don't think it had anything to do with medicinal purposes," Smith said. Detectives are investigating. "This was really the result of good heads-up police work by the two officers who responded there for the burglar alarm," Smith said. "Without their keen observations, we never would have got involved with it."

RYANAIR - A EURO TO TAKE A LEAK!

RYANAIR is plumbing new depths with its latest passenger charge — the company wants to introduce a €1 toilet charge on its flights.

In a BBC interview, airline chief executive Michael O’Leary said: "One thing we have looked at in the past and are looking at again is the possibility of maybe putting a coin slot on the door so that people may have to spend a pound to spend a penny."
Asked what someone would do if they were caught short — of money — O’Leary responded: "I don’t think there is anybody in history who has got onboard a Ryanair aircraft with less then a pound."

Yesterday Ryanair’s publicity team were unconvincing in their attempts to wash their hands of Mr O’Leary’s comments.
"Michael makes a lot of this stuff up as he goes along and while this has been discussed internally, there are no immediate plans to introduce it."

The spokesperson said O’Leary’s comments highlight Ryanair’s obsession with lowering costs and passing these savings on in the form of lower fares.
"Passengers using train and bus stations are already accustomed to paying to use the toilet, so why not on airplanes?"

Then again, maybe O’Leary was just taking the p*ss.