Tag Archive for Brain

| December 1, 2012
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I Think Therefore I Login

I Think Therefore I LoginForgetting a password could become a thing of the past according to the ZDNet article Brainwaves as Passwords; Secure and Near-Reality. John Fontana at Identity Matters says the technology to do so could be here as early as June 2013. Interaxon, which develops thought-controlled computing, is releasing the Muse headband sensor device that is designed to use brainwaves to login.

Brainwave sensors

Muse headband sensor device that is designed to bring brainwaves into computingThe slim plastic Muse headband fits against a person’s forehead and slips over the ears. The band houses four brainwave sensors. There are not any authentication applications that work with Interaxon’s Muse headband yet. The article notes that the company has a software developer’s kit (SDK) for anyone who wants to do it. However, company CEO Ariel Garten says such an app is reasonable and possible.

“The user could create a specific brainwave signature or a password they would never have to say out loud or type into a computer,” said Ms. Garten, who spoke at the Blur Conference in Broomfield, CO. According to Mr. Fontana the CEO demonstrated thought-controlled applications and the Muse headband.

Brainwave login passwords

government can read their pin numberWhile brainwave passwords might conjuror up thoughts of being snatched off the street and having a brain drain, Ms. Garten said the technology isn’t mind reading. “People might think the government can read their pin number, but we can’t read your thoughts or images in your head.” Muse, which talks to devices via Bluetooth, is an electroencephalograph (EEG) that records brainwaves and reads the brain’s overall pattern of activity to detect certain states such as relaxed or alert explains the article.

The brainwaves are turned into binary data and the translated waves are used to control anything electric. Users can learn to manipulate brainwave patterns, like flexing muscles. “This builds your brain like doing bench press reps in the gym, Ms. Garten claims.

laptops can be controlled with the mindApplications that run on smartphones, tablets, or laptops can be controlled with the mind according to the article. Ms. Garten believes the technology is set to take off, she is quoted in the article, “In 25 years, interacting with technology using your mind will be as ubiquitous as a gesture is today.”

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This seems like a cool idea, maybe Sony or Nintendo will take it over. This is not a panacea for passwords.

With the small real-world experience with biometrics in the enterprise (Thinkpad T61p laptop) it worked adequately for local machine access, but what about when you have to scale this to 10s of thousands of users? Just imagine the HR issues involved with obtaining employee’s fingerprints or as the article suggests brainwaves.

In my environment, where I think biometrics makes sense, there is all the political baggage that comes with biometrics and children and the anti-education, anti-efficiency, and religious groups. I wrote here about a Texas school distinct facing the wrath of these groups for RFID cards, not biometrics.

Then there are the technical issues with any password (character string or biometric) system. The hashed password or brainwave needs to be stored somewhere in binary form. If your AD is compromised you still have a problem.

swilson, one of the commenters at ZDNet wrote: “all biometrics are the same! It doesn’t matter what trait they come up with, the same core biometric challenges remain. The challenges he sees are:

  1. How to stop replay attacks?
  2. How to secure centrally stored templates that are needed to support ‘federated’ biometric access control from multiple points?
  3. What is the real-world sensitivity/specificity trade-off i.e. quantified False Positive and False Negative Error Rates? Knowing a bit about brain physiology, I am very skeptical that anyone can measure a highly distinctive brain wave with better than 90-95% accuracy.
  4. Most basic problem: revokeability. What’s to be done in the event of a compromise, when you cannot cancel and reissue a brain wave, or fingerprint, or iris, or genome?”
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| November 8, 2012
Comments Off on Complainers Are Bad for Your Brain

Complainers Are Bad for Your Brain

Complainers Are Bad for Your BrainMinda Zetlin recently asked in an Inc. article, Listening to Complainers Is Bad for Your Brain, Do you hate it when people complain? It turns out there’s a good reason. Trevor Blake, a serial entrepreneur and author of Three Simple Steps: A Map to Success in Business and Life says that listening to too much complaining is bad for your brain.

In the book, Mr. Blake describes how neuroscientists have learned to measure brain activity when faced with various stimuli, including a long gripe session. Mr. Blake writes’

The brain works more like a muscle than we thought … So if you’re pinned in a corner for too long listening to someone being negative, you’re more likely to behave that way as well.

Even worse, being exposed to too much complaining can actually make you dumb. Research shows that exposure to 30 minutes or more of negativity–including viewing such material on TV, actually peels away neurons in the brain’s hippocampus. “That’s the part of your brain you need for problem-solving,” he says. “Basically, it turns your brain to mush.”

Mr. Blake explains if you’re running a company, don’t you need to hear about anything that may have gone wrong? ”

Train your brainThere’s a big difference between bringing your attention to something that’s awry and a complaint. “Typically, people who are complaining don’t want a solution; they just want you to join in the indignity of the whole thing. You can almost hear brains clink when six people get together and start saying, ‘Isn’t it terrible?’ This will damage your brain even if you’re just passively listening. And if you try to change their behavior, you’ll become the target of the complaint.

So, how do you defend yourself and your brain from all the negativity? Blake recommends the following tactics:

Brain defense tactics

Walk away1. Get some distance  You should look at complaining like smoking. a complainer is a smoker spewing out toxic fumes and you are the victim of their smoking. “The approach I’ve always taken with complaining is to think of it as the same as passive smoking.” Your brain will thank you if you get yourself away from the complainer if you can.

2. Ask the complainer to fix the problem If you can’t easily walk away, a second strategy the article recommends is to ask the complainer to fix the problem.

“Try to get the person who’s complaining to take responsibility for a solution,” Blake says. “I typically respond to a complaint with, ‘What are you going to do about it?'” Many complainers walk away huffily at that point because he hasn’t given them what they wanted, Blake reports. But some may actually try to solve the problem.

3. Shields up! When you’re trapped listening to Shields up!a complaint, you can use mental techniques to block out the griping and save your neurons. Blake favors one used by the late Spanish golfer Seve Ballesteros during a match against Jack Nicklaus–a match the crowd wanted Ballesteros to lose. “He was having difficulty handling the hostility of the crowd,” Blake says. “So he imagined a bell jar that no one could see descending from the sky to protect him.”

A related strategy is to mentally retreat to your imagined favorite spot, someplace you’d go if you could wave a magic wand. “For me, it was a ribbon of beautiful white sugary sand that extended out in a horseshoe shape from a private island,” Blake says. “I would take myself to my private retreat while people were ranting and raving. I could smile at them and nod in all the right places and meanwhile take myself for a walk on my private beach.”

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Having worked in retail a long time ago, you learn some of these behaviors when you have to deal with the public. I practiced a combination of shields up, and let the public blather on, and then moved on as quickly as possible. It is important to develop a coping mechanism because listening to complainers is bad for your brain.

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| June 25, 2011
Comments Off on 40 Years of Malware – Part 2

40 Years of Malware – Part 2

40 Years of Malware - Part 22011 marks the 40th anniversary of the computer virus. Help Net Security notes that over the last four decades, malware instances have grown from 1,300 in 1990, to 50,000 in 2000, to over 200 million in 2010. Fortinet (FTNT) marks this dubious milestone with an article that counts down some of the malware evolution low-lights.

The Sunnyvale, CA network security firm says that viruses evolved from academic proof of concepts to geek pranks which have evolved into cybercriminal tools. By 2005, monetization of the virus scene was underway and almost all viruses developed for the sole purpose of making money via more or less complex business models. According to FortiGuard Labs, the most significant computer viruses over the last 40 years are:

– See Part 1 Here – See Part 2 Here  – See Part 3 Here  – See Part 4 Here

1945 – A Bug is Born –  Grace Murray Hopper, a researcher at Harvard, notes a system failure and finds a moth trapped in relay panels.

1949 – Self-replicating programs – John von Newman a researcher from Hungary published the theoretical base for computers that store information in their “memory”.

1962 – A group of Bell Telephone Labs researchers invents a game that destroys software programs.

1971 – The Creeper Virus appears on ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet. It replicates itself and displays a message: “I’m the Creeper: Catch Me if You Can.”

1974 – The Wabbit – was a self-replicating program, that made multiple copies of itself on a computer until it bogs down the system to such an extent that system performance is reduced to zero and the computer eventually crashes. This virus was named wabbit because of the speed at which it was able to replicate.

Apple IIe1981 – Elk Cloner – the first widespread virus on the Apple (AAPL) II platform, spreads by the floppy disk and infects boot sectors, generating messages and impairing performance.

1983 –  The term “computer virus” comes into vogue after Professor Len Adleman at Lehigh University demonstrates the concept at a seminar.

1986 – The Brain is the first global epidemic on the PC platform and shows businesses and consumers are clueless about protection.

1987 – Jerusalem virus – On any Black Friday (Friday the 13th), it would delete any programs that were run, instead of infecting them, so it simply couldn’t be ignored,” Roger Thompson told News.com, Australia. “You couldn’t throw away your hard drive, and reformatting it didn’t remove the virus,” the chief research officer for AVG said.

BSD Daemon1988 – The Morris worm – created by Robert Tappan Morris, infects DEC VAX and Sun machines running BSD UNIX connected to the Internet and becomes the first worm to spread extensively “in the wild”, and one of the first well-known programs exploiting buffer overrun vulnerabilities.

1990 – Chameleon– the first documented polymorphic virus, malware that adapts and changes to avoid detection.

1992 – Michelangelo – was expected to create a digital apocalypse on March 6, with millions of computers having their information wiped according to mass media hysteria surrounding the virus.  Later assessments of the damage showed the aftermath to be minimal.

1995 –  Concept – the first Macro virus attacked Microsoft (MSFT) Word documents.

1996 – Laroux – the first Microsoft (MSFT) Excel virus, appears in the wild.

1999 – The Happy99 worm – invisibly attached itself to emails and would display fireworks to hide the changes being made then wished the user a happy New Year. It modified system files related to Microsoft (MSFT) Outlook Express and Internet Explorer (IE) on Windows 95 and Windows 98.

1999 – The Melissa worm targeted Microsoft (MSFT) Word and Outlook-based systems, and created considerable network traffic.

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Back in the day, I had to deal with both Happy99 and Melissa, as well as the occasional Stoned. Melissa was the easiest to deal with since I was running a GroupWise shop at the time, once the news spread, we just pulled the Cat5 from the GWIA and we saw minimal blowback. Let’s hear it for technological diversity.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| May 23, 2011
Comments Off on 40 Years of Malware – Part 1

40 Years of Malware – Part 1

40 Years of Malware - Part 1Twenty-five years ago, two brothers in Pakistan came up with one of the greatest annoyances in the modern world. Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi developed the first major personal computer malware “Brain” in 1986 at their Lahore, Pakistan computer shop. Brain spread eventually spread across the world,  one infected floppy disk at a time.

– See Part 1 Here – See Part 2 Here – See Part 3 Here – See Part 4 Here

Floppy diskBrain was the first of what became known as “stealth viruses.” Because most 1980s computers only had tiny internal hard drives or none at all, everything had to be run from floppy disks. Brain would bury itself in the part of the disk necessary for running programs and infect any computer it ran into. It would then sit in the computer’s memory and infect new disks inserted into that machine as well. While Brain was relatively harmless, it was the mother of all viruses, which spawned a host of malicious malware.

Robert Slade, a senior instructor at the International Information System Security Certification Consortium (ISC2) told News.Com, Australia:

… the virus itself spreads far and wide without any reference to the original media and programs they were selling … Because this was a boot sector infector, it just spread on to any floppy disk that had been put into an infected machine.

There has been a great deal of speculation about why the brothers created the virus. So on the 25th anniversary, F-Secure (FSC1V) researcher Mikko Hypponen, who was among the first to analyze Brain, decided to track down the Farooq brothers and ask them about their groundbreaking work. Mr. Hypponen originally reverse-engineered the virus and discovered a short block of text with the phone number and address of the place where it was created buried within Brain’s code.  Amazingly enough, the brothers are still working at their company, Brain Telecommunications, which is still headquartered at the same Pakistan address near Lahore Railway Station listed in the virus code.

During the interview, the brothers explained how and why they created Brain, adding that they wrote the code primarily as an experiment to see how far it could spread via floppy disk. The brothers, who are now successful businessmen in Lahore, were quick to point out that Brain wasn’t destructive, and explicitly distanced themselves from the more malicious viruses that have sprung up in the past quarter of a century. To the Farooqs, today’s malware is rooted in pure criminality — something they denounce, but don’t feel entirely responsible for spawning. As they pointed out, if they hadn’t created the world’s first PC virus, someone else surely would have.

 

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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