With the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation looming, colleges and universities in the United States are working out how to achieve compliance.
In a paper appearing in the journal Nature Biotechnology, researchers from MIT and Stanford University have described a new system they've developed for protecting the privacy of people who contribute their genomic data to large-scale biomedical studies. These studies are intended to uncover links among genetic variations in identifying the causes for diseases. The protocol is intended to help make currently restricted data available to the scientific community, potentially enabling secure genome crowdsourcing while still making sure individuals can contribute their genomes to a study without compromising their privacy.
The mop-up work for Facebook in the wake of its privacy reform could take much longer than we might expect.
According to a recent report from cybersecurity training provider Wombat Security, end users in the education sector are more knowledgeable about building safe passwords than people in other industries. The 2018 Beyond the Phish Report analyzed user responses to nearly 85 million questions related to phishing and data security. Respondents came from 16 industries, including education, government, technology and manufacturing.
One in five attacks on educational institution were motivated by espionage, often targeting sensitive research, and 11 percent of attacks are "just for fun," according to the report.
Spending on security, including hardware, software and services, will reach $91.4 billion this year, according to a new forecast from International Data Corp, marking a 10.2 percent increase over 2017 spending. That growth rate will remain relatively steady throughout the forecast period, according to the company, holding a compound annual growth rate of 10 percent from 2016 to 2021, when the forecast calls for $120.7 billion in spending.
Five universities have banded together to fight cyber security threats with OmniSOC, a cyber security operations center that will provide real-time intelligence sharing and threat analysis for its members. A joint initiative of Indiana University, Northwestern University, Purdue University, Rutgers University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, OmniSOC's goal is "to help higher education institutions reduce the time from first awareness of a cyber security threat anywhere to mitigation everywhere for members," according to a news announcement.
A new open source database at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, developed in partnership with the University of Texas at Dallas and Michigan State University, will track shootings at K–12 schools and analyze the factors involved in such attacks. The project is supported by a grant from the National Institute of Justice's Comprehensive School Safety Initiative, a research effort focused on identifying the root causes of school violence as well as developing and evaluating strategies for boosting school safety.
Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Harvard University recently presented a paper describing "Veil," a new system intended "to make private browsing more private." Among other security features, Veil encrypts any data stashed by the browser in memory until it's displayed on the screen; the data is unintelligible until it passes through the Veil decryption algorithm.
A two-year effort to develop curriculum guidelines for cybersecurity education will officially be released this week, two months after a report with the details was published by a joint task force. "Cybersecurity Curricula 2017" will be introduced on February 22nd at the Annual ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education meeting taking place in Baltimore. At the same time a new "community engagement website" will also be launched.
