For cyber defence, UK to hire criminal hackers

Adam Withnall, The Independent | Oct 23, 2013, 06.17 AM IST
READ MORE Philip Hammond|Cyber Reserve Unit|Michael White
The UK’s new cyber defence unit could recruit convicted criminal hackers, the defence secretary has said. Philip Hammond said the armed forces did not have an “absolute bar” on signing up criminals, and told the BBC’s Newsnight that former hackers would be assessed on case basis. Lieutenant Colonel Michael White, head of the new team of “cyber reservists”, said he would not be setting “hard and fast rules about individual personality traits”.


The Joint Cyber Reserve Unit will be responsible for protecting the UK from cyber attacks — attempts to extract information and attempts to deny services by bringing websites down.

In addition, hackers will be used as a military asset with an “offensive capability” — striking out at enemy targets for the benefit of national security.

David Day, a computer forensics expert, told Newsnight that former malicious hackers represent “some of the best talent” in the country. And White said, “I think if they could get through the security process, then if they had that capability that we would like, then if the vetting authority was happy with that, why not? We’re looking at capability development, rather than setting hard and fast rules about individual traits.”

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​An app that sends alerts if satellites are spying on you

PTI | Oct 22, 2013, 02.34 AM IST
READ MORE Friends
NEW YORK: A new smartphone app that tells you when and what imaging spacecraft might be watching you has been developed in the US.

The app, SpyMeSat, provides notifications when spy satellites and unclassified imaging satellites are zooming above your head and may be taking your picture.

All of the imaging satellites in SpyMeSat are in low-Earth orbit at an altitude of about 805km, SPACE.com reported. Enabled SpyMeSat satellites include such zoom-lens notables as GeoEye, the French space agency's SPOT-5, India's CartoSat-2A, DigitalGlobe's WorldView satellites and Canada's RADARSAT-2.

"I actually got the idea for the app from talking to friends outside the aerospace industry who were always very interested in space and satellites and imaging from space. This app answers those questions in a fun and interactive way," said Alex Herz, president of Orbit Logic in Greenbelt, Maryland which developed the app.

The app uses available public information about commercial and international imaging satellites. It also uses orbit data from the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). SpyMeSat does not include all imaging spacecraft. No classified imaging satellites, from any nation, have their orbit information published, so these satellites do not show up in the app.
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Virus study confirms ancient human migration

PTI | Oct 22, 2013, 03.36 PM IST
READ MORE University of Wisconsin Madison|human virus|human genomes|herpes simplex virus type 1|genetic code
Virus study confirms ancient human migration
A study of the full genetic code of a common human virus confirms the "out-of-Africa" pattern of human migration.
WASHINGTON: A study of the full genetic code of a common human virus confirms the "out-of-Africa" pattern of human migration, scientists said.


The virus under study, herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1), usually causes nothing more severe than cold sores around the mouth, said Curtis Brandt, senior author of the study and a professor of medical microbiology and ophthalmology at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Brandt and co-authors Aaron Kolb and Cecile Ane compared 31 strains of HSV-1 collected in North America, Europe, Africa and Asia.

"The viral strains sort exactly as you would predict based on sequencing of human genomes. We found that all of the African isolates cluster together, all the virus from the Far East, Korea, Japan, China clustered together, all the viruses in Europe and America, with one exception, clustered together," Brandt said.

"What we found follows exactly what the anthropologists have told us, and the molecular geneticists who have analysed the human genome have told us, about where humans originated and how they spread across the planet," he said.

Studies of human genomes have shown that our ancestors emerged from Africa roughly 150,000 to 200,000 years ago, and then spread eastward toward Asia, and westward toward Europe.

In the new study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, researchers broke the HSV-1 genome into 26 pieces, made family trees for each piece and then combined each of the trees into one network tree of the whole genome.

It was this grouping that parallelled existing analyses of human migration.

The new analysis could even detect some intricacies of migration. Every HSV-1 sample from the US except one matched the European strains, but one strain that was isolated in Texas looked Asian.

"How did we get an Asian-related virus in Texas?" Kolb said. Either the sample had come from someone who had travelled from the Far East, or it came from a native American whose ancestors had crossed the "land bridge" across the Bering Strait roughly 15,000 years ago.

"We found support for the land bridge hypothesis because the date of divergence from its most recent Asian ancestor was about 15,000 years ago. The dates match, so we postulate that this was an Amerindian virus," Brandt said.

"Our results clearly support the anthropological data, and other genetic data, that explain how humans came from Africa into the Middle East and started to spread from there," Brandt said.

In the virus, as in human genomes, a small human population entered the Middle East from Africa.

"There is a population bottleneck between Africa and the rest of the world; very few people were involved in the initial migration from Africa," Brandt said.

"When you look at the phylogenetic tree from the virus, it's exactly the same as what the anthropologists have told us," he said.
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