The researchers from the Security and Cryptography Laboratory at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne are able to capture keystrokes by monitoring the electromagnetic radiation of PS/2, universal serial bus, or laptop keyboards. They've outline four separate attack methods, some that work at a distance of as much as 65 feet from the target.

In one video demonstration, researchers Martin Vuagnoux and Sylvain Pasini sniff out the the keystrokes typed into a standard keyboard using a large antenna that's about 20 to 30 feet away in an adjacent room.

Website here.

Rather than thinking about IDS as a piece of device/software that provides fancy features. Let me try to summarize some assertions about IDS: 

IDS can capture tons of intrusion events, there is so much of don't care events it is difficult to single out event such as zero day event in the midst of such noise.

It requires tremendous effort to sift through the log and derive meaningful actions out of the log entries.

IDS needs a dedicated administrator to manage. An administrator who won't get bored of looking at all the packets and patterns, a truly boring job for a security engineer. Probably this job would interest a geekier person and geeks tend to their own interesting research!

There are companies that do without IDS, and they do just fine. I agree with Alan's assessment that IDS is like a Checkbox in most cases.  Business can run without IDS just fine, why invest in such a technology?

Firewalls and other devices have built in features of IDS, so why invest in a separate product.

IDS is like Vitamins, nice to have, not having won't kill you in most cases. Customers are willing to pay for Pain Killers because they have to address their pain right away. For Vitamins, they can wait. Stop and think for moment, without Anti-virus product, businesses can't run for few days. But, without IDS, most businesses can run just fine and I base it out of my own experience.

Probably, I would have offended folks from the IDS camp. I have a good friend who is a founder of an IDS company, I am sure he will react differently if he reads my narratives about IDS.  Once businesses start realizing that IDS is a Checkbox, they will scale down their investments in this area. In the current economic climate, financial institutions are not doing well. Financial institutions are big customers in terms of security products, with the current scenario of financial meltdown, they would scale down heavily on their spending on Vitamins.

Running IDS software on VMware sounds fancy.  Technology does not matter unless you can address real world pain and prove the utilitarian value of such a technology. I am really surprised that IDS continues to exist. Proof of existence does not forebode great future. Running IDS on VMware does not make it any more utilitarian. I see a bleak future for IDS.

• Moderator: Nick Hoover, Senior Editor, InformationWeek
• Speaker - Anne Berkowitch, Co-Founder & CEO, SelectMinds
• Speaker - J.B. Holston, CEO and President, NewsGator
• Speaker - Umberto Milletti, CEO, InsideView

Businesses can take advantage of social networks by finding innovative ways to reach out to people. Looking at who you know and how you know them can benefit you. Knowing a personal connection to someone that you are trying to contact (for sales) is helpful. The blurring between home, personal, and business life is making this information more available and better able to leverage. People are able to capture more valuable long term information from social networks.

A lot of social network applications can be taken from the talent management space. Deploying alumni networks as a talent source is also a great asset. Alumni represent a well-known and relevant population. This provides a great economic benefit from a social network.

If you are running a sales organization and looking at building a pipeline of leads, consider how these leads are relevant. The ability to get more leads is apparent in finding the right person, right connection, and right contact. Underlying everything are productivity and efficiency. How much time are sales reps spending researching and pursuing each opportunity? With information on social networks, the time can be greatly decreased. Knowledge sharing is something that can be actively measured.

The ROI varies with the business issue that’s trying to be addressed by a particular network. Recruiting for example has a very concrete, measurable ROI. Knowledge share gets a little more tricky. How do you measure how much is shared and the impact on business systems? Businesses need to determine what specific goal they are trying to address.

CFOs want to see ROI, not intuitive information. If you can demonstrate engagement and participation in these networks and knowledge sharing tools, more and more executives are getting comfortable seeing how it’s used at a qualitative and process level. It’s a very case by case basis.

One major crisis that we see in our customers is the competition between sales and marketing. Each wants to do their own thing, they go together like oil and water. However, the push of the economy is now forcing them work together. This is a great opportunity for IT to step in and help them collaborate and be more productive.

Other resistance from companies are how to manage what they are trying to accomplish while still giving employees free reign of sites like Facebook. What are the incentives for using these technologies? How does it fit into your company culture and productivity scale? You must bring meaning to the structure of engaging in social networks.

Social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook would not exist if people did not contribute information to them. However, if people don’t know that it is there, it does not exist. People need to see the value and get drawn in to engage. There are two ways that companies get into social networks. Tie it into the business process. The general idea of social networks are intuitive and easy to understand, which make it an easier case to present to chief executives. Make it clear - how do you go about it and what’s the value?

Social networks are intrinsically about extending the network, the more contacts you have, the more to choose from when researching a specific contact. It also has to be integrated into your dataworkflow. Companies are going to build a variety of networks inside and outside the enterprise. The big companies (SAP, IBM) are all rushing to offer collaborative and social network functionality. However, this is not entirely useful unless it’s integrated into the entire infrastructure.

There is a new electronic capture device that has been developed primarily for law enforcement, surveillance, and intelligence operations that is also available to the public. It is called the Cellular Seizure Investigation Stick, or CSI Stick as a clever acronym. It is manufactured by a company called Paraben, and is a self-contained module about the size of a BIC lighter. It plugs directly into most Motorola and Samsung cell phones to capture all data that they contain. More phones will be added to the list, including many from Nokia, RIM, LG and others, in the next generation, to be released shortly.

Another news article.

I was just reminded of this randomly just by reading this list of new tools released at the Defcon this year. Sounds like a busy conference, with a lot of hackers who love what they do. Good stuff.

It has become more like a global fair than what most people think of conferences; even the badge is highly unique. I say this because there are so many things to do at DEFCON, other than going to talks, that you could spend your whole weekend looking at the “World’s Largest Boar!” so to speak. One of the CTF (Capture the Flag) contest winners this year actually exclaimed that he only made it to 2 talks in 12 years! I am also one of those individuals who barely get a chance to go to talks and now that the speaker pool is so diverse it’s hard to find all of the “stuff” they release.

Read the list and full article here

The National Risk Register is intended to capture the range of emergencies that might have a major impact on all, or significant parts of, the UK. It provides a national picture of the risks we face, and is designed to complement Community Risk Registers, already produced and published locally by emergency planners. The driver for this work is the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, which also defines what we mean by emergencies, and what responsibilities are placed on emergency responders in order to prepare for them. Further information about the Act can be found on the UK Resilience website.

Seems like the greatest threat to national security is a flu pandemic.

LAS VEGAS -- Last weekend, more than 9,000 hackers, freaks, feds and geeks gathered for the 16th annual DefCon, the world's largest computer security convention.

Wired.com brought you live coverage of the most newsworthy events at DefCon 16. Here are some photos from the lighter side of the conference.

Left: South Korean hackers compete in the Capture the Flag competition. The goal is to hack into and keep control of targeted servers.

Mr. Sinister and Dragon Cracker battle it out in a round of Guitar Hero -- one of DefCon's newest competitions.

Bringing-your-own-booze supply ensures optimal buzz at DefCon. Shortly after this picture was taken, hotel security escorted this backpack-hacker to his room.

Computer geeks from the National Institute of Standards and Technology set up a network secured with quantum encryption in a conference room at DefCon. The quantum-entangled photons are being used to encrypt a video stream across a line-of-site network.

A compact optical bench and an atomic clock (left) are used to secure a network with quantum encryption.

In the Lock Pick Pavilion, DefCon attendees Dustin, Jennalynn and Kunfoozball practice their lock-picking skills.

DefCon founder and organizer Jeff Moss, aka Dark Tangent, at the conference's closing ceremony Sunday.

A collection of black badges awaits the winners of the various competitions. These badges give their holders lifetime entry to DefCon.

One of DefCon's logos, the smiley-faced skull and crossbones, is welded inside a yellow sphere. The sphere is the primary stage of one of the most difficult competitions at DefCon: The Mystery Challenge.

Unbeknownst to attendees, this laptop is sniffing RFID tags and taking photos of their owners when they pass in front of the detectors. RFID tags are used in everything from building access to some credit cards.

At the closing ceremony, DefCon organizers turn off the lights while the attendees wave their high-tech badges back and forth.