SCADA, Telematics & GPS Technologies

The Mumbai terrorists used an array of commercial technologies — from Blackberries to GPS navigators to anonymous e-mail accounts — to pull off their heinous attacks.

For years, terrorists and insurgents around the world have used off-the-shelf hardware and software to stay ahead of bigger, better-funded authorities. In 2007, former U.S. Central Command chief Gen. John Abizaid complained that, with their Radio Shack stockpile of communications gear, “this enemy is better networked than we are.” The strikes that killed at least 174 appears to be another example of how wired today’s “global guerrillas” can be.

As they approached Mumbai by boat, the terrorists “steered the vessel using GPS equipment,” according to the Daily Mail. A satellite phone was later found aboard.

Once the coordinated attacks began, the terrorists were on their cell phones constantly. They used BlackBerries “to monitor international reaction to the atrocities, and to check on the police response via the internet,” the Courier Mail reports.

The gunmen were able to trawl the internet for information after cable television feeds to the two luxury hotels and office block were cut by the authorities.

The men looked beyond the instant updates of the Indian media to find worldwide reaction to the events in Mumbai, and to keep abreast of the movements of the soldiers sent to stop them.

Outside of Leopold’s Cafe, “one of the gunmen seemed to be talking on a mobile phone even as he used his other hand to fire off rounds,” an eyewitness told The New York Times.

The terror group then took credit for the bloodshed with a series of e-mails to local media. They used a “remailer” service to mask their identities; earlier attacks were claimed from cyber cafes.

[Photo: AP; plugged in: CA, Giz]

A major disaster recovery exercise in Scandinavia relied on Inmarsat BGAN to send vital images to help emergency responders worldwide.

The Triplex 2008 event on the border of Sweden and Norway used an unmanned aircraft to survey the “disaster zone”.

Images captured were sent via a BGAN terminal once the MD4-1000 mini unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), weighing just 900 grams, had landed.

Enhance readiness
The annual Triplex 2008 exercise in Scandinavia, supported by the United Nations’ International Humanitarian Partnership, aimed to enhance the readiness of emergency responders for a real event.

The UAV was provided by Scandicraft, while low resolution images were sent using the Asign satellite-optimised IP-based solution from Inmarsat application provider AnSur..

Vizada, a leading satellite communications provider and an Inmarsat distribution partner, provided the airtime, enabling the critically-important images to be sent quickly via Inmarsat to a UN server in Geneva, Switzerland.

Preparation key
Scandicraft’s head of business development, Einar Stuve, said: “The combination of our UAV and the BGAN proved highly effective, enabling the first pictures to be uploaded within 10 minutes.

“The images were published on a map covering the entire disaster area, which was available via the internet for first responders anywhere in the world to view - even before hazardous materials teams had suited up to enter the site.”

The centre of the exercise was in Charlottenberg, Sweden, 70 kilometres (43 miles) from the Norwegian capital, Oslo.

links:www.scandicraft.com

links: www.vizada.com

A proposal by the Department of Homeland Security attempts to address one potential security problem with RFID-chipped passports, but leaves more obvious problems hanging fire.

In an effort to detect attempts to clone the data stored on RFID chips used on US Passport Cards, DHS on Wednesday announced that it is recommending that manufacturers supplying these RFID chips include a “unique identifier number,” or Tag Identifier (TID).

The TID would be used to ascertain when a chip’s data has been cloned, as one would do to create a fake passport. If two passports with the same identifier number turned up at the border, one of them could be deduced as fake. That number would actually be the second unique number in the chip, since all a passport’s RFID chip stores is a unique number that is indexed in a database. (Currently the chips hold one unique number and one generic manufacturer code; that generic code is the one that would be replaced with a TID.)

It’s an identification model that works reasonably well with mobile phones and automobiles, but an identity document is a different creature. Conceivably, the ID number might help to determine whether, for instance, a hacker intercepting the snail mail has waved a reader near a State Department envelope and picked off the data without having to open the envelope — with “contactless” technology, the envelope would not have to be opened. But the model may not help with other security issues RFID researchers, privacy activists, and anti-terrorism experts have flagged. (more…)

Industry insiders say critical infrastructure is not prepared for cyber attacks and recommend that asset owners and operators begin by taking five steps to enhance their security.

SAN JOSE, CA -  Secure Computing Corp., a leading enterprise gateway security company, announced the results of a study conducted during August and September 2008 in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. The study surveyed 199 international security experts and other “industry insiders” from utilities, oil and gas, financial services, government, telecommunications, transportation, and other critical infrastructure industries. Despite a growing body of legislation and regulation, more than half of these experts believed that most critical infrastructure continues to be vulnerable to cyber attack. Further, a majority of respondents said that major attacks have already begun or are likely to occur in the next 12 months.

“An attack on any one of these industries could cause widespread economic disruptions, major environmental disasters, loss of property, and even loss of life,” said Elan Winkler, Director of Critical Infrastructure Solutions for Secure Computing. “This study revealed that many critical infrastructure organizations are simply not ready for the cyber attacks which are coming soon.”

Rick Nicholson, Vice President of Research for Energy Insights, an IDC company, who authored a white paper based on the survey, added, “Most utility CIOs believe that their companies will be compliant with relevant standards, but still have a long way to go before being adequately prepared for all cyber attacks.”

In the study, respondents were asked to indicate the state of readiness for eight different industries. More than 50% of respondents believed that utilities, oil and gas, transportation, telecommunications, chemical, emergency services, and postal/shipping industries were not prepared. For some sectors, such as postal/shipping and transportation, as many as three out of four experts indicated that the infrastructure was not ready for attack. Only the financial services industry was considered prepared, although nearly 40% believed that even this sector was not ready to defend itself.

Survey participants were also asked which industry was the biggest target, which was the most vulnerable to attack, and which was the most detrimental if breached. The insiders picked the energy sector in all three cases, with 33% saying it was the biggest target, 30% saying it was the most vulnerable, and 42% saying it would be the most detrimental if attacked.

When asked to name the biggest bottleneck to improving cyber security, the largest number of experts (29%) pointed to the cost of security measures. Apathy was the second most likely to be selected as the primary bottleneck, with government bureaucracy and internal issues tying for third. (more…)

Climate change is devastating the flowers of Walden Pond, picking off those species that cannot react to rising temperatures.

Comparing data meticulously gathered by Henry David Thoreau more than a century and a half ago with more recent observations, Harvard biologists report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that more than a quarter of Walden’s plant species have already been lost. And an additional 36 percent are in imminent danger, including lilacs, roses and buttercups.

“It had been thought that climate change would result in uniform shifts across plant species, but our work shows that plant species do not respond to climate change uniformly or randomly,” said co-author Charles Davis, a biologist at Harvard, in a release.

The Walden study shows that even small changes in temperature can have outsized impacts on plants that are evolutionarily adapted to fulfill ecological niches. Together with changes seen in other locations, like the unprecedented pine beetle damage in the West, the new work suggests that finely tuned biological systems are having a difficult time keeping up with the rapid pace of human-induced climate change.

The average temperature around Walden has risen by more than four degrees over the last century as increasing greenhouse gas concentrations from burning fossil fuels changed the earth’s climate.

But the warming is not just mowing the forest down, it’s shaping it as some plant species thrive under the new global conditions.

“Most strikingly, species with the ability to track short-term seasonal temperature variation have fared significantly better under recent warming trends,” the authors write.

Although the design of the Walden study is simple, it depends on the value of Thoreau’s rare pre-industrial data.

“Whenever you have an opportunity to get a dataset where someone who has made very careful efforts to observe things in a systematic way, it gives you a snapshot of a particular time period and lets you make comparisons,” said Mark Schwartz, a world expert in phenology, the field of seasonal changes in living things, at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

Unfortunately, very few ecosystems have been recorded in such excruciating detail.

“We don’t have a large number of datasets of this sort,” Schwartz said. “Most of them are concentrated in Europe and in Asia. There are very few in North America.”

For example, Isabelle Chuine at France’s Center for Evolutionary and Functional Ecology, published a paper in Nature using detailed grape harvest records in Burgundy dating from as far back as 1370. Schwartz also noted that many European weather services record phenological data along with their weather measurements, while American weather stations do not. As a result, Americans know less about when our plants bloom than many other countries.

But Schwartz is trying to change that by empowering Americans to contribute their own Thoreau-style data. He’s the chair of the National Phenology Network, a new organization attempting to incorporate data from ecological stations, citizen scientists and other types of fieldwork.

Already, one of the NPN’s efforts — Project BudBurst — has marshaled several thousand people to track the timing of plant flowerings in their backyards as they shift due to climate change.

Their data could not only benefit scientists of the present and future, but could aid in providing Americans with direct evidence of climate change, helping to create the political will necessary to address the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.

“When someone asks me about climate change, I say, ‘You can go observe it in your own backyard,’” Schwartz said. “If you want to see what’s happening, start taking records and see for yourself.”

Citation: “Phylogenetic patterns of species loss in Thoreau’s woods are driven by climate change” http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0806446105

Image: A specimen from Harvard University’s Herbaria :: Rosaceae Pyrus bretschneideri Rehder

GainSpan has a chip that can curb energy consumption in the home, and notify your doctor if you’re about to have a heart attack.

The company has produced an energy efficient WiFi chip that it hopes to install in dryers, electrical meters and other devices in the home. The idea is that utilities and consumers will shut off and/or power down appliances with wireless signals remotely to curb electricity consumption.

GainSpan is currently working with manufacturers to insert its chip into cold storage units, meters and other devices. Hitachi Plant Technologies, the industrial technology arm of the Japanese giant, makes sensors incorporating GainSpan’s chips. The company was spun out of Intel.
Source: GreenTechMedia

Although already in use at some airports in the US, the UK, and Netherlands, full-body scanning — a security technology quite capable of showing people’s unmentionables — might now fade away as a specter facing Americans and other travelers in European airports, due to a lawmakers’ vote.

Some airports in Europe, including London’s Heathrow and Amsterdam’s Schiphol, already make use of full-body scanners, as do some airports in the US. (more…)

With millions of GPS-based navigation devices on the road today, it is time someone considered the question: What if there’s an attack on the GPS network itself?

Researchers at Virginia Tech and Cornell University spent more than a year building equipment that can transmit fake GPS signals capable of fooling receivers.

“GPS is woven into our technology infrastructure, just like the power grid or the water system,” said Paul Kintner, electrical and computer engineering professor and director of the Cornell GPS Laboratory in a statement. “If it were attacked, there would be a serious impact.”

GPS is a U.S. government-built navigation system of more than 30 satellites circling earth twice a day in specific orbits. The satellites transmit signals to receivers on land, sea and in air. Based on the signals received from the satellites, devices are able to triangulate their exact positions on the globe. But if those satellite signals were wrong — or were spoofed — a GPS device might come up with the wrong location based on the signals it was receiving.

The researchers started by programming a briefcase-size GPS receiver used in the research of the uppermost part of the Earth’s atmosphere, known as ionospheric research, to send out fake signals. The phony receiver was placed in the proximity of a navigation device, where it anticipated the signal being transmitted from the GPS satellite. Almost instantly, the reprogrammed receiver sent out a false signal that the GPS-based navigation device took for the real thing.

The experiments to show the vulnerability of GPS receivers to spoofing could help devise methods to guard against such attacks, says Brent Ledvina, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Virginia Tech, and will be detailed in a research paper to be released Thursday.

“It’s almost like someone nearby is spoofing your favorite radio station by transmitting at the same frequency but higher power fooling your receiver into believing it is getting the right station,” says Ledvina.

The idea of GPS receiver spoofing has already been considered by federal authorities. In a December 2003 report, the Department of Homeland Security detailed seven countermeasures including monitoring the absolute and relative GPS signal strength, monitoring the satellite identification codes and the number of signals received and checking the time intervals between the received signals to guard against spoofs.

Still those fall short and would not have successfully fended off the signals produced by a reprogrammed receiver, said the researchers.

Instead they have suggested a few countermeasures that involve both hardware and software changes. “We have two patent applications which include a software algorithm to help make changes to how receivers react to signals,” says Ledvina.

The other patent is around the spoofer tool used, he says. “The idea is to help government and other companies use it to potentially make better receivers,” says Ledvina.

Photo: NASA

Links: HomeLandSecurity, wired

Auto theft can be very dangerous and this is a car thief that should have thought twice before stealing a bait car in Washington State. Check out this dramatic video.

A bait car, also called a decoy car, is a vehicle used by a law enforcement agency to capture car thieves. The vehicles are specially modified, with features including GPS tracking, hidden cameras that record audio, video, time, and date, which can all be remotely monitored by police. A remote controlled immobiliser (known as a “kill” device in law enforcement jargon) is installed in the vehicle that allows police to disable the engine and lock the doors.

The car is filled with valuable items and then parked in a high-vehicle theft area. In some cases, the vehicle is simply left unlocked with the keys hanging from the ignition. When the car is stolen, officers are alerted, who then send the radio signal that shuts off power to the engine and locks the doors, preventing an escape. The practice does not violate entrapment laws, since suspects are not persuaded to steal the vehicle by any means other than its availability and their own motivation.

The concept and technology was first developed by Jason Cecchettini of Pegasus Technologies and was used by the Sacramento Police Department in 1996, using Sedans like the Toyota Camry, and sports cars, such as the Honda Prelude.

The bait car is a phenomenon in the study of criminal behavior since it offers a rare glimpse into the actions and reactions of suspects before, during and after the crime. Unlike other crimes caught on surveillance cameras, suspects, at least initially, believe and react as if the crime has been wholly successful, until the bait car is apprehended by law enforcement personnel.

The largest bait car fleet in North America is operated by the Integrated Municipal Provincial Auto Crime Team (IMPACT), based in Surrey, British Columbia. Surrey was designated the “car theft capital of North America” by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in 2002. Their program was launched in 2004, and has contributed to a 10% drop in auto thefts since then.

A LoJack is a similar technology, in that it allows a vehicle to be remotely tracked if it is stolen. These are typically installed in police vehicles.

Bait cars can be used as part of a honey trap, a form of sting operation, in which criminals not known to the police are lured into exposing themselves. Unlike a sting operation that targets a known or suspected criminal, a honey trap establishes a general lure to attract unknown criminals.

Bait cars (and the stings they are used in) have been featured in numerous documentary or reality television programs, including COPS and World’s Wildest Police Videos. They are also the exclusive focus of a 2007 Court TV (now truTV) series simply titled Bait Car.

Links: News10, BaitCar, BSM Wireless

It’s a fun new activity to do, along with new killer applications keep on submerging on the web…

source: MAKE