Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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VB2015 offer for new security companies
Write an article for the Bulletin, get a half-price ticket for the conference. Things are going well for the security industry. That may, of course, be because of the poor state of the security of the Internet, but it does mean that new security firms are continuing to appear all over the world. The products…
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Registration for VB2015 has opened
Early bird discounts available for registrations made before 30 June. Today, we have opened registration for VB2015, the 25th Virus Bulletin International Conference. ‘VB’ is one of the oldest security conferences in the world, and one of the very few that travels around the globe. After a very successful event in Seattle in 2014, we…
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Ross Anderson awarded BCS Lovelace Medal
Cambridge professor to deliver VB2015 keynote. Yesterday, the British Computer Society (BCS) announced that the 2015 Lovelace Medal has been awarded to Prof. Ross Anderson. Named after and in honour of Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), who is often credited as being the first computer programmer, the Lovelace Medal is awarded to “individuals who have made an…
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Throwback Thursday: The Unbearable Lightness of Testing
VB gets in on the Throwback Thursday act, delving into the archives. Over the last couple of years, the ‘Throwback Thursday’ trend has taken the Internet by storm, with social media users indulging in a weekly wallow in nostalgia, fondly resurrecting photographs of themselves wearing terrible fashion in their childhood or sporting awful haircuts in…
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Does it matter if my banking password is ‘Prague’?
Users do choose weak passwords, but they aren’t as big a problem as we think. This week, I spent a few days at the Cyber Security Summit Financial Services conference in Prague, discussing the state of security with people who work in the financial sector. Unsurprisingly, a common topic of discussion was that group of…
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Volatile Cedar campaign – cyber espionage isn’t just for large nation states
Details of malware to be discussed at VB2015. Researchers at Check Point have revealed details of a cyber-espionage campaign, dubbed ‘Volatile Cedar’, that has been active since at least 2012. The campaign, whose motive appears to be political rather than financial, revolves around a custom-made remote access trojan named ‘Explosive’, which is separated into a…
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Virus Bulletin announces two VB2015 keynotes
Ross Anderson and Costin Raiu to deliver keynote addresses at 25th Virus Bulletin conference. Two days after we published the programme for VB2015, we are excited to announce that both Ross Anderson and Costin Raiu will deliver keynote addresses at the conference. Ross Anderson, Professor of Security Engineering at the University of Cambridge, is an…
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Google ‘suspends’ CNNIC from Chrome’s certificate store
Chinese certificate authority told to re-apply. When a web client, such as a browser, attempts to make an HTTPS connection, it needs to know that no man-in-the-middle attack is taking place. The web server therefore proves its authenticity by presenting the client with a certificate. This certificate is cryptographically signed by a certificate authority (CA),…
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VB2014 paper: Swipe away, we’re watching you
Hong Kei Chan and Liang Huang describe the various aspects and the evolution of point-of-sale malware. Since the close of the VB2014 conference in Seattle in October, we have been sharing VB2014 conference papers as well as video recordings of the presentations. Today, we have added ‘Swipe away, we’re watching you’ by Fortinet researchers Hong…
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VB2015 conference programme announced
From drones to elephants: an exciting range of topics will be covered in Prague. In six months’ time, security researchers from around the world will gather in Prague for the 25th Virus Bulletin conference. Today we are excited to reveal the conference programme. As every year, the selection committee’s task was very difficult with some…
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