Safari Browser Exploit Produced Within 9 Hours In Hacking Competition

Shane Macaulay and Dino Dai Zovi, a software engineer and security researcher taking part in the brilliantly named "PWN to Own" Hack-a-Mac contest at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, managed to hack into and take control of a MacBook by finding a security exploit that takes advantage of an open Safari browser window. Shane and his teammate Dino won the prize of a brand new MacBook -- presumably loaded with Firefox or some other browser variant -- for managing to find the hole on the second and final day of the contest.

The hack wasn't exactly a breeze, since the pair admitted to a total of 9 hours in order to find and exploit the weakness. Apple has patched OS X four times over the last year to fix dozens of security updates, and only regurgitated the corporate line when asked for comment on this particular vulnerability. ("Apple takes security very seriously", well duh!)

Even with the recent arousal of interest in Mac OS security, the world has yet to see any kind of exploit released into the wild world web; when / if one does, we'd probably expect the most damaging exploit to use good ol' social engineering rather than a complicated hack like this. Still, Mac users should take some form of satisfaction from knowing that the issue of Mac security is being investigated, rather than being taken for granted.

Top 10 Internet Crimes of 2006

The IC3 (Internet Crime Complaint Center) , a partnership betweeen the FBI and the NW3C (National White Collar Crime Center) issued a report for the year 2006.

In 2006, IC3 processed more than 200,481 complaints that support Internet crime investigations by law enforcement and regulatory agencies nationwide. These complaints were composed of many different fraud types such as auction fraud, non-delivery, and credit/debit card fraud, as well as non-fraudulent complaints, such as computer intrusions, spam/unsolicited e-mail, and child pornography. All of these complaints are accessible to federal, state, and local law enforcement to support active investigations, trend analysis, and public outreach and awareness efforts.

From the submissions, IC3 referred 86,279 complaints of crime to federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies around the country for further consideration. The vast majority of cases were fraudulent in nature and involved a financial loss on the part of the complainant. The total dollar loss from all referred cases of fraud was $198.44 million with a median dollar loss of $724.00 per complaint. This is up from $183.12 million in total reported losses in 2005. Other significant findings related to an analysis of referrals include:

• Internet auction fraud was by far the most reported offense, comprising 44.9% of referred complaints. Non-delivered merchandise and/or payment accounted for 19.0% of complaints. Check fraud made up 4.9% of complaints. Credit/debit card fraud, computer fraud, confidence fraud, and financial institutions fraud round out the top seven categories of complaints referred to law enforcement during the year.
• Of those individuals who reported a dollar loss, the highest median losses were found among Nigerian letter fraud ($5,100), check fraud ($3,744), and other investment fraud ($2,695) complainants.

• Among perpetrators, 75.2% were male and half resided in one of the following states: California, New York, Florida, Texas, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. The majority of reported perpetrators were from the United States. However, a significant number of perpetrators where also located in United Kingdom, Nigeria, Canada, Romania, and Italy.

• Among complainants, 61.2% were male, nearly half were between the ages of 30 and 50 and one-third resided in one of the four most populated states: California, Texas, Florida, and New York. While most were from the United States, IC3 received a number of complaints from Canada, Great Britain, Australia, India, and Germany.
• Males lost more money than females (ratio of $1.69 dollars lost per male to every $1.00 dollar lost per female). This may be a function of both online purchasing differences by gender and the type of fraudulent schemes by which the individuals were victimized.

• Electronic mail (e-mail) (73.9%) and webpages (36.0%) were the two primary mechanisms by which the fraudulent contact took place.


• Recent high activity scams seen by IC3 include hit man scams, phishing attempts associated with spoofed sites, and counterfeit checking scams.

The total dollar loss from all referred cases of fraud in 2006 was $198.44 million. That loss was greater than 2005 which reported a total loss of $183.12 million. Of those complaints with a reported monetary loss, the mean dollar loss was $2529.90 and the median was $724.00. Sixteen percent (15.6%) of these complaints involved losses of less than $100.00, and (39.4%) reported a loss between $100.00 and $1,000.00. In other words, over half of these cases involved a monetary loss of less than $1,000.00. Nearly a third (31.6%) of the complainants reported losses between $1,000.00 and $5,000.00 and only 13.3% indicated a loss greater than $5,000.00. The highest dollar loss per incident was reported by Nigerian Letter Fraud (median loss of $5,100.00). Check fraud victims, with a median loss of $3,744.00 and investment fraud (median loss of $2,694.99) were other high dollar loss categories. The lowest dollar loss was associated with credit/debit card fraud (median loss of $427.50).3

It's brimming with interesting statistics, including the Top 10 IC3 Complaint Categories:
Category % of complaints
Auction Fraud 44.9%
Non-Delivery 19%
Check Fraud 4.9%
Credit/Debit Card Fraud 4.8%
Computer Fraud 2.8%
Confidence Fraud 2.2%
Financial Instiitutions Fraud 1.6%
Identity Theft 1.6%
Investment Fraud 1.3%
Child Pornography 1.0%

Tiny Light Bulbs

Ultrasmall light-emitting fibers deposited on electrodes can serve as nanometer-scale light sources.

By depositing narrow light-emitting fibers on a silicon substrate patterned with gold electrodes, researchers at Cornell University have created extremely small light sources with dimensions of only a few hundred nanometers. The fibers are made of a polymer that is embedded with light-emitting molecules, which light up when exposed to an electric field. When the researchers apply voltage to the electrodes, the fiber glows orange at different points, much like Christmas lights, says Hector Abruna, a chemistry and chemical-biology professor at Cornell who is one of the project's leaders.

The researchers use a straightforward technique called electrospinning to lay down the fibers directly on the substrate. Because the method is relatively simple, the light sources should be easy to integrate into lab-on-a-chip devices, where light can be used to detect chemical and biological molecules, such as drugs and proteins, which could be tagged with fluorescent dyes or might absorb a portion of the light. And because the fibers are made of polymers, they could find use in flexible displays. "You can imagine these [fibers] integrated into clothing," says George Malliaras, a Cornell materials-science and engineering professor who is collaborating on the work with Abruna and Harold Craighead at Cornell's Center for Nanobiotechnology.

The extremely small size of the light sources could also lead to novel approaches to doing microscopy, Malliaras says. The fibers range from 150 nanometers to 5 micrometers in diameter. But the light-emitting spots on the fibers measure 240 and 325 nanometers or less. This makes the light sources smaller than the 600-nanometer wavelength of the light that they emit, a property that could be harnessed to develop new microscopy methods.

To electrospin the fibers, the researchers place a tiny droplet of polymer solution on a metal needle tip. Then they apply a voltage difference between the tip and the silicon substrate, which is etched with gold electrodes and is placed a few millimeters away. The voltage causes the droplet to elongate and form a jet that flows down to the substrate. As it moves down, the solvent evaporates, and hardened polymer fibers get deposited on the electrode-covered substrate.

The polymer in this case contains ruthenium-based molecules, which emit light when subjected to an electrical current. When the researchers apply a voltage to the gold electrodes, tiny spots on the stretches of fiber spanning adjacent electrodes glow orange. At high voltages of 100 volts, the light is bright enough that the researchers can see it in the dark in spite of the emitters' small size. "I would say [this] is a breakthrough in the way nanosize light sources are made," says Stefan Bernhard, a chemistry professor at Princeton University.

The electrospinning technique offers multiple advantages. Using the method, one should be able to make fibers with diameters of 50 nanometers or less, which could lead to even smaller light sources, Malliaras says. Plus, the technique should make fabricating nanoscale light emitters on practical lab-on-a-chip devices relatively easy, although one would still need to etch the gold electrodes.

"The distinguishing and extremely interesting aspect of this work is the minute size of the light sources they describe," says John de Mello, who researches nanoscale organic light-emitting devices at Imperial College London. Until now, organic light-emitting devices have typically been about one square millimeter in size, he says, which is ideal for standard lab-on-a-chip applications, such as detecting bacteria or proteins. But the nanometer-sized light sources would be important for niche applications requiring speed and a very small resolution--for example, monitoring how a chemical reaction is proceeding as chemicals flow through microfluidic channels. "This approach offers a means of dramatically improving the resolution of such measurements," de Mello says.

Much research remains to be done, however. For any practical application, the researchers would need to precisely control the arrangement of the fibers on the silicon substrate. But the work is a first step in making nanoscale light sources using a straightforward method, Malliaras says.

Says de Mello, "Once it's known there's a low-cost route to making sub-wavelength light sources, you can be sure somebody will find a use for them. That's the real excitement of this kind of work."

Your Virtual Clone

Chatterbots from MyCyberTwin can respond to questions about you when you're not online.

Historians of artificial intelligence never talk about AI's progress in the 1960s without a reference to Eliza, the first virtual personality. Eliza was a text-chat program written in 1966 by MIT AI expert Joseph Weizenbaum to parody a Rogerian psychotherapist, largely by turning every statement by the "patient" back into a question. If you tell Eliza "I am feeling blue today," it's apt to respond, "Do you enjoy feeling blue today?" To modern users, the pattern is obvious, and the illusion of talking to a real person drops away almost instantly. (See for yourself here or here.) Yet many people who used Eliza when the program was new were convinced, at least temporarily, that it was a real person.

Now there's a Web-based service that, in essence, lets you set up your own Eliza and train it to mimic your own personality. No one will be fooled into thinking it's you, but MyCyberTwin, launched earlier this month, does a decent job of acting as your stand-in or virtual public-relations agent when you're not reachable. If you embed your cybertwin in your blog, website, or MySpace profile, visitors can learn about you through an open-ended conversation. You can program your cybertwin with as much factual information and as much of your personality as you like. If you think visitors to your blog might ask "What are you doing Saturday night?", you can train it to respond "Going to see Harry Potter with friends. Why don't you join us?"

MyCyberTwin is free, up to a point. About 10,500 people have signed up for the service, which is a venture of a Sydney, Australia, company called RelevanceNow and is still in its beta-testing phase. Of course, the concept only goes so far. Like Eliza, your cybertwin has no real intelligence at its core, and it must resort to lame conversational gambits if you haven't provided it with a canned answer to your visitor's specific question. Helpfully, however, the MyCyberTwin site contains extensive tools to help you anticipate those questions, such as personality tests and quizzes about your views on sex, politics, and religion. Those tools are all free too. RelevanceNow plans to make money by charging heavy users, such as businesses, by the conversation if their cybertwins have more than 500 visitors per month; by licensing MyCyberTwin to social-networking sites, which might integrate it into their offerings; and possibly, in the future, through targeted Web advertising.

"We wanted to build software clones of humans that learn about you and effectively function on your behalf," says Liesl Capper, cofounder and CEO of RelevanceNow. "The problem with creating a chat AI is that it's very laborious, trying to think of variations on what people will say and then creating responses. Building one has always been a labor of love that takes months, if not years. What we have built is the ability for people to make a cybertwin really quickly."

"Quickly" is a relative term. If you opt to take advantage of MyCyberTwin's entire collection of training tools, you could easily spend a day or more programming your cybertwin. The reward, however, is a more convincing simulacrum than Eliza or most of the other consumer-level "chatterbots" that have been written since Eliza's day. Because a cybertwin can be armed with limitless information about you, it's much more intimate and engaging to converse with than many competing chatterbots, such as the instant-messaging-based bots from Spleak, avatar-based chatterbots from Verbots, or Microsoft's virtual search assistant, Ms. Dewey.

Of course, academic and corporate AI experts have built more-advanced chatterbots in hopes of one day passing the so-called Turing test by convincing human judges that a machine is human. Since 1991, the annual Loebner Prize competition has offered $25,000 to the programmer of the first chatterbot that passes this test in a text-only conversation; so far, the prize has gone unclaimed. But Jabberwacky, the winner of the smaller $2,000 prize for the most human-seeming chatterbot in 2005 and 2006, is capable of deep and sometimes bizarre conversations that make a cybertwin sound rather vacant. Designed by Rollo Carpenter of the U.K. AI company Icogno, Jabberwacky stores every conversation it has ever had and uses pattern-matching techniques to generate contextually appropriate responses in a new conversation.

For $30 per year, you can get a Jabberwacky chatterbot that mimics your own personality. But it can't be embedded into another website, and it must be trained through lengthy, repetitious conversation. Starting off with MyCyberTwin is far easier: you choose a base personality, such as "warm-hearted, intellectual" or "cheeky, down to earth," and answer about 30 questions about yourself drawn from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a widely used personality-assessment system. After that, however, there are optional "classroom" modules that ask a total of 425 fairly deep questions in 18 subject areas, such as family, humor, philosophy, and politics.

Writing a thoughtful answer to a question such as "What is the meaning of life?" is bound to take at least a few minutes; now multiply that by several hundred. Indeed, the classroom questions are so probing and thorough that I doubt many MyCyberTwin users will put in the work. I made an attempt with my own cybertwin. The basic setup process was simple and easy. But I spent about three hours on the classroom questions and only completed three subject areas.

Once you're finished training your cybertwin, you can give people the link to your personal page at MyCyberTwin.com, or you can make your cybertwin appear on another Web page by pasting the provided code into that page's source HTML. If your cybertwin turns out to be extremely popular and you pass the limit of 500 conversations per month, you can buy more credits for a price that RelevanceNow hasn't yet announced.

Before you put a cybertwin online, be sure to read the company's privacy policy. The MyCyberTwin site and the embedded cybertwin interfaces don't yet contain any advertising, but RelevanceNow does reserve the right to give voluntarily provided personal information to advertisers. This could become a significant revenue source for the company, given that advertisers often pay extra to reach "qualified leads" who have provided demographic data or professed an interest in a specific product area.

Also, be careful what you tell another cybertwin. Although the MyCyberTwin site does not make it obvious, the service actually saves a transcript of every chat session for the perusal of the cybertwin's owner. That's mainly so that visitors can leave information such as phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and requests for more information. But an unsuspecting user who gets into a racy conversation with a cybertwin on the assumption that there's no one at home might be in for some embarrassment.

MyCyberTwin can be a bit slow, taking up to 10 seconds to "think" before it responds to a visitor's question. Nonetheless, creating a MyCyberTwin chatterbot can give your online admirers much deeper, quicker access to your personality and background than dry autobiographical statements or even months of blog entries.

"People are spending a lot of time putting their personalities online," Capper notes, whether through their MySpace pages, blogs, or avatars in virtual worlds such as Second Life. "It may only be for an audience of 10 people, but it's important to them, and it's a taste of things to come. This way, you can have your friends chat to you when you're sleeping. It's about engaging with people and answering their questions without having to go through a hundred e-mails."

MRI-Compatible Robots

A new motor made of nonmagnetic and dielectric materials can power a robotic medical device inside an MRI scanner, significantly improving cancer diagnoses and treatments.

Engineers at Johns Hopkins University have designed a new motor to be compatible with magnetic-resonance imaging (MRI) so that it can drive an image-guided robot for medical applications, such as cancer biopsies and therapies. The MRI-compatible motor makes it possible for doctors to remotely perform procedures within the scanner, using the MRI to guide the robot.

"The real novelty of what they have done is the compatibility with the high-magnetic-field environments like the MRI," says David Trumper, a professor of engineering at MIT.

When physicians perform cancer biopsies on organs such as the prostate gland, they are commonly guided by ultrasound scanners. But such imaging methods are only able to image, for instance, the outer shape of the prostate. Therefore, doctors are blindly picking samples to test, running the risk that they will miss an actual tumor. Surgery guided by an MRI and a remote-controlled robot would be far more accurate because the robotic needle could be aligned directly with the tumor as seen by the MRI. But until now, there has been no device capable of operating inside the scanner's small tunnel without distorting the images, which depend on a strong magnet and electric currents.

The Johns Hopkins robot, built using conventional techniques, was designed to enable transperineal needle access to the prostate under direct MRI guidance. Essential to coming within a millimeter--a necessary level of precision--of the targeted tumor is a new motor specifically developed for this application. The motor provides controllable pneumatic actuation so that the robotic device is able to steadily and slowly move alongside the patient in the MRI scanner, says Dan Stoianovici, an associate professor of urology and mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins and the director of the Urology Robotics program, at which the robot was developed.

The engineers created a new type of pneumatic step motor. It's based on the idea that end-to-end motion of a piston within its cylinder is always exact and is very easy to achieve by pressurizing the cylinder. A pneumatic step motor is not an entirely new concept; previous versions were based on hydraulic and thermal power, but they lacked mechanical efficiency.

The motor designed by the Johns Hopkins engineers has three cylinders connected to a series of gears that achieve rotary motion by being pressurized equally by air flow. The team of engineers used six step motors to power the MRI-compatible robot, MrBot, that they built to give surgeons remote access to the prostate gland. The robotic device is networked with the magnetic-resonance imager so that when an image is taken, it can be mapped through the network connection by way of the robotic controller. The robotic controller is then in the position to start sending air to the robot to get it in motion.

"The motor is low power and low speed, but for the application, it seems pretty well conceived," says Trumper. "It is a cool design."

"The robot is a remarkable achievement," says Ron Rodriguez, associate professor of urology, medical oncology, and cellular and molecular medicine at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. It will allow for more-rapid and -accurate cancer-therapy methods, such as radiation placement, explains Rodriguez.

The next step for the engineers is to test the robotic device in clinical trials. If those tests go well, the researchers will look into the development of additional MRI-compatible robots for other medical procedures.

Boosting the Power of Chemotherapy

Scientists have uncovered genetic targets that could increase lung-cancer cells' sensitivity.

Researchers have used a genome-wide screen to uncover genes that protect lung-cancer cells from Taxol (paclitaxel), a commonly used chemotherapy agent. Without the protection of certain genes, the cancer cells could be killed by drug doses 10,000 times lower than normal. The results could lead to synergistic drug combinations that combat tumors at lower doses with fewer side effects.

The study, performed by researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, is one of the first to use the gene-silencing technique called RNA interference to study drug sensitivity across the entire genome. Led by cell biologist Michael White, the researchers used a library of silencing RNAs to block expression of every known gene in the human genome--there are about 21,000--in only six weeks.

The University of Texas researchers found 87 genes that seemed to regulate the cancer's sensitivity to the chemotherapy drug. Drugs and natural products that interfere with some of these genes already exist, says White, and researchers can now test whether combining these drugs with Taxol leads to a better response.

The results point to "a way to be more savvy about how to combine drugs," says Tito Fojo, a senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute's Center for Cancer Research, although he cautions that "some trial and error" will still be required.

Cancer patients' responses to chemotherapy agents such as Taxol vary widely and unpredictably. Some patients do not get better; some do but later relapse as their tumors grow resistant to the drug. "We want to identify the molecular basis of the capacity of cancer cells to respond to a drug," says White. Taxol is given to most lung-cancer patients and is also a common treatment for breast and ovarian cancers. Like all chemotherapy, it causes side effects including pain, nausea, and tingling. A combination treatment that would allow the drug to be given at a much lower dose could make chemotherapy easier on patients.

To identify the target genes, the researchers used an RNA-interference library made commercially available only in the past year and a half. The library allows scientists to reliably silence every human gene.

That broad sweep pointed toward a role for some surprising genes in protecting the cancer cells from Taxol. The drug works by interfering with cell division, but many of the genes uncovered in the Texas screen, such as a sperm-specific protein often found in ovarian-cancer cells, are not implicated in that process.

While the Texas study uncovered some genes that seem to make cancer cells more vulnerable to Taxol than normal cells are, Fojo cautions that new therapies won't be on the way unless there are good drugs to take advantage of these vulnerabilities. "The more we understand about how drugs work, the better," he says. "We're going to see a lot of use of [RNA interference] in this matter."