Yahoo! - May 19, 2008
This Yahoo! article says hackers could use telescopes to view tiny reflections in glasses, teapots and the human eye and capture valuable screen information. Some researchers have found ways to correlate visual keystrokes to data. This sophisticated interception research is called side-channel research. Do we all need privacy shields on our computer screens? And, then type in the dark? Crazy.
Discover Magazine - January 2008 - P. 45
Discover Magazine posted a short article in their January 2008 issue explaining how computer scientists in Switzerland (it just had to be the Swiss - they of ultimate banking privacy and security) are getting closer to breaking the 1,024 bit encryption coding used to secure Internet messages.
I’m no mathematician, but apparently hackers could use this new factorization technique, along with multiple computer load distribution, to more quickly crack a random 1,024 bit number.
We’re in no imminent danger of unsecured Internet transactions, but this just highlights to need to move away from technical protocols to more basic data devaluation, i.e. make the data worthless so no one has any incentive to steal it.