Danger in the Internet Cafe? New Computer Security Threat for Wireless Networks: Typhoid Adware

John Aycock (left) and student Daniel Medeiros Nunes de Castro have predicted a new computer security threat: Typhoid adware.

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There's a potential threat lurking in your internet café, say University of Calgary computer science researchers. It's called Typhoid adware and works in similar fashion to Typhoid Mary, the first identified healthy carrier of typhoid fever who spread the disease to dozens of people in the New York area in the early 1900s.

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"Our research describes a potential computer security threat and offers some solutions," says associate professor John Aycock, who co-authored a paper with assistant professor Mea Wang and students Daniel Medeiros Nunes de Castro and Eric Lin. "We're looking at a different variant of adware -- Typhoid adware -which we haven't seen out there yet, but we believe could be a threat soon."

Adware is software that sneaks onto computers often when users download things, for example fancy tool bars or free screen savers, and it typically pops up lots and lots of ads. Typhoid adware needs a wireless internet café or other area where users share a non-encrypted wireless connection.

"Typhoid adware is designed for public places where people bring their laptops," says Aycock. "It's far more covert, displaying advertisements on computers that don't have the adware installed, not the ones that do."

The paper demonstrates how Typhoid adware works as well as presents solutions on how to defend against such attacks. De Castro recently presented it at the EICAR conference in Paris, a conference devoted to IT security.

Typically, adware authors install their software on as many machines as possible. But Typhoid adware comes from another person's computer and convinces other laptops to communicate with it and not the legitimate access point. Then the Typhoid adware automatically inserts advertisements in videos and web pages on the other computers. Meanwhile, the carrier sips her latté in peace -- she sees no advertisements and doesn't know she is infected ¬- just like symptomless Typhoid Mary.

U of C researchers have come up with a number of defenses against Typhoid adware. One is protecting the content of videos to ensure that what users see comes from the original source. Another is a way to "tell" laptops they are at an Internet café to make them more suspicious of contact from other computers.

"When you go to an Internet café, you tell your computer you are there and it can put up these defenses. Anti-virus companies can do the same thing through software that stops your computer from being misled and re-directed to someone else," says Aycock.

Why worry about ads? Aycock explains it this way: "Not only are ads annoying but they can also advertise rogue antivirus software that's harmful to your computer, so ads are in some sense the tip of the iceberg."

The paper Typhoid Adware can be found: http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~aycock/papers/eicar10.pdf

'Biosensors' on Four Feet Detect Animals Infected With Bird Flu

mouse earns a water reward for choosing the odor of samples of feces infected with avian flu over a feces sample from ducks that were not infected.

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Blood hounds, cadaver dogs, and other canines who serve humanity may soon have a new partner ― disease detector dogs ― thanks to an unusual experiment in which scientists trained mice to identify feces of ducks infected with bird influenza. Migrating ducks, geese, and other birds can carry and spread flu viruses over wide geographic areas, where the viruses may possibly spread to other species.

Reported in Boston at the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the proof-of-concept study may pave the way for development of biosensors-on-four-feet that warn of infection with influenza and other diseases.

"Based on our results, we believe dogs, as well as mice, could be trained to identify a variety of diseases and health conditions," said U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist Bruce A. Kimball, Ph.D., who presented the study results. The study was among nearly 8,000 scientific reports scheduled for presentation at the ACS meeting, one of the largest scientific gatherings of 2010.

"In fact, we envision two broad, real-world applications of our findings," Kimball added. "First, we anticipate use of trained disease-detector dogs to screen feces, soil, or other environmental samples to provide us with an early warning about the emergence and spread of flu viruses. Second, we can identify the specific odor molecules that mice are sensing and develop laboratory instruments and in-the-field detectors to detect them."

Kimball cited the likelihood that a suite of chemicals, rather than a single compound, are responsible for producing the difference in fecal odor between healthy and infected ducks. His team is investigating the use of instruments in detecting these so-called volatile, or gaseous, metabolites in animal feces. Once accomplished, they can use statistical techniques to sift through the data to determine the pattern of volatiles that indicate the presence of infection.

Kimball and colleagues from the Monell Chemical Senses Center trained inbred mice to navigate a maze and zero in on infected duck feces. The mice got a reward of water every time they correctly identified the infected sample and no reward when they zeroed in on feces from healthy ducks. Eventually, the mice became experts at identifying feces from infected ducks.

Magnetism's Subatomic Roots: Study of High-Tech Materials Helps Explain Everyday Phenomenon

A new theoretical physics model helps define the subatomic origins of ferromagnetism -- the everyday "magnetism" of compass needles and refrigerator magnets.

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The modern world -- with its ubiquitous electronic devices and electrical power -- can trace its lineage directly to the discovery, less than two centuries ago, of the link between electricity and magnetism. But while engineers have harnessed electromagnetic forces on a global scale, physicists still struggle to describe the dance between electrons that creates magnetic fields.

Two theoretical physicists from Rice University are reporting initial success in that area in a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Their new conceptual model, which was created to learn more about the quantum quirks of high-temperature superconductors and other high-tech materials, has also proven useful in describing the origins of ferromagnetism -- the everyday "magnetism" of compass needles and refrigerator magnets.

"As a theorist, you strive to have exact solutions, and even though our new model is purely theoretical, it does produce results that match what's observed in the real world," said Rice physicist Qimiao Si, the lead author of the paper. "In that sense, it is reassuring to have designed a model system in which ferromagnetism is allowed."

Ferromagnets are what most people think of as magnets. They're the permanently magnetic materials that keep notes stuck to refrigerators the world over. Scientists have long understood the large-scale workings of ferromagnets, which can be described theoretically from a coarse-grained perspective. But at a deeper, fine-grained level -- down at the scale of atoms and electrons -- the origins of ferromagnetism remain fuzzy.

"When we started on this project, we were aware of the surprising lack of theoretical progress that had been made on metallic ferromagnetism," Si said. "Even a seemingly simple question, like why an everyday refrigerator magnet forms out of electrons that interact with each other, has no rigorous answer."

Si and graduate student Seiji Yamamoto's interest in the foundations of ferromagnetism stemmed from the study of materials that were far from ordinary.

Si's specialty is an area of condensed matter physics that grew out of the discovery more than 20 years ago of high-temperature superconductivity. In 2001, Si offered a new theory to explain the behavior of the class of materials that includes high-temperature superconductors. This class of materials -- known as "quantum correlated matter" -- also includes more than 10 known types of ferromagnetic composites.

Si's 2001 theory and his subsequent work have aimed to explain the experimentally observed behavior of quantum-correlated materials based upon the strangely correlated interplay between electrons that goes on inside them. In particular, he focuses on the correlated electron effect that occur as the materials approach a "quantum critical point," a tipping point that's the quantum equivalent of the abrupt solid-to-liquid change that occurs when ice melts.

The quantum critical point that plays a key role in high-temperature superconductivity is the tipping point that marks a shift to antiferromagnetism, a magnetic state that has markedly different subatomic characteristics from ferromagnetism. Because of the key role in high-temperature superconductivity, most studies in the field have focused on antiferromagnetism. In contrast, ferromagnetism -- the more familiar, everyday form of magnetism -- has received much less attention theoretically in quantum-correlated materials.

"So our initial theoretical question was, 'What would happen, in terms of correlated electron effects, when a ferromagnetic material moves through one of these quantum tipping points?" said Yamamoto, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Fla..

To carry out this thought experiment, Si and Yamamoto created a model system that idealizes what exists in nature. Their jumping off point was a well-studied phenomenon known as the Kondo effect -- which also has its roots in quantum magnetic effects. Based on what they knew of this effect, they created a model of a "Kondo lattice," a fine-grained mesh of electrons that behaved like those that had been observed in Kondo studies of real-world materials.

Si and Yamamoto were able to use the model to provide a rigorous answer about the fine-grained origins of metallic ferromagnetism. Furthermore, the ferromagnetic state that was predicted by the model turned out to have quantum properties that closely resemble those observed experimentally in heavy fermion ferromagnets.

"The model is useful because it allows us to predict how real-world materials might behave under a specific set of circumstances," Yamamoto said. "And, in fact, we have been able to use it to explain experimental observations on heavy fermion metals, including both the antiferromagnets as well as the less well understood ferromagnetic materials."