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