Hackers bypass smart card security

The US government has been stepping up its use of smart cards to help lock down its computer networks, but hackers have found ways around them, reports PC World.

Over the past 18 months, security consultancy Mandiant has come across several cases where determined attackers were able to get onto computers or networks that required both smart cards and passwords.

In a report to be released tomorrow, Mandiant calls this technique a 'smart card proxy'.

The attack works in several steps. First, the criminals hack their way onto a PC. Often they'll do this by sending a specially crafted e-mail message to someone at the network they're trying to break into.

NEC has released a network control platform software to research organisations around the world, enabling new network innovations that can be applied to cloud services, telecommunication and enterprise networks, notes Stockhouse.

As a first step of the release, the software has been provided to Stanford University, Kyushu Institute of Technology and the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology for experimentation and evaluation.

The platform enables sophisticated control of switches and routers that support the 1.0 specification of the OpenFlow protocol.

Three community broadband networks in Lancashire, UK, have received termination notices following the take-over of their backhaul supply by a joint venture between BT and the county council, states Computer Weekly.

The three village networks that serve Barley, Great Asby, and Wennington use spare transit capacity on the Cumbria and Lancashire Open Education (Cleo) network supplied with Internet backhaul by the Lancaster University Network Service (Luns).

A research network, Wray, has also received notice from Luns. It wrote to the village network operators on 10 December 2010 telling them it would no longer be supporting the Cleo network.