In the last few decades, computer science has changed the world. People now use computers to pay their bills, talk to their friends, and virtually everything else. Because of this dependence on computers, the vast majority of computer users have opened a portal into their homes that hackers and cyber thieves can use to steal …
PKZip utilizes a proprietary stream cipher that is vulnerable to a known plaintext attack, as Eli Biham and Paul C. Kocher describes in A Known Plaintext Attack on the PKZIP Stream Cipher. In ZIP Attacks with Reduced Known-Plaintext, Michael Stay describes an improved known plaintext attack that works against files that non-PKZip zip programs such …
TEMPEST stands for Transient Electromagnetic Pulse Surveillance Technology. Computers and other electronic equipment release interference to their surrounding environment. You may observe this by placing two video monitors close together. The pictures will behave erratically until you space them apart. What is important for an observer is the emission of digital pulses (zeroes and ones) …
Virtually every computer in the world has some form of adult pornography stored somewhere on its hard drive. This can be due to personal use, viruses, or the fact that pornography seems to be included with every downloaded file, opened webpage, and email attachment. Pornography can also be a concern when many people have access …
GPG, or GNU Privacy Guard, is a free replacement and competing product for PGP (Pretty Good Privacy). The project is a data encryption and decryption application which provides end-users with a cryptographic privacy and authentication system for communicating electronic data. GPG can be used to sign, encrypt, and decrypt text, for email, files, directories, and …
Generic.dx is a rather common trojan virus that infects the computer and weakens its security in order to allow other viruses and malicious software to infect the computer. It enters the computer via an email that the user opens, a website he/she visits, or a third party software that he/she downloads and installs. Generic.dx trojans …
A botnet or robot network is a group of computers running a computer application that only the owner or software source controls and manipulates. The botnet may refer to a legitimate network of several computers that share program processing amongst them. Usually though, when people talk about botnets, they are talking about a group of …
RSA, which stands for Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman, is a security algorithm used in digital cryptography. RSA differs from older symmetric algorithms because it has the ability of allowing digital signing as well as advanced encryption for online commerce systems and high-profile institutions. RSA was one of the first major advancements in digital cryptography but …
Computer viruses have been around just about as long as the personal computer has existed. With the advent of the Internet, the ability of viruses to rapidly spread has increased substantially. Despite this increase in capability to infect large numbers of computers across international borders, the definition of a computer virus has not substantially changed …
TrueCrypt is a free, open source disk encryption software that is available for the Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Mac, Linux, and Unix operating systems. TrueCrypt provides users with real time encryption/decryption, parallelization and pipelining to read/write to partitions as fast as non-encrypted partitions, and plausible deniability through hidden volumes and hidden operating systems …