University of Missouri Hacked

COLUMBIA, Mo. - A computer hacker accessed the Social Security numbers of more than 22,000 current or former students at the University of Missouri, the second such attack this year, school officials said Tuesday. The FBI is investigating. University officials said campus computer technicians confirmed a breach of a database last week by a user or users whose Internet accounts were traced to China and Australia. The hacker accessed personal information of 22,396 University of Missouri-Columbia students or alumni who also worked at one of the system's four campuses in St. Louis, Kansas City, Rolla or Columbia in 2004. The hacker obtained the information through a Web page used to make queries about the status of trouble reports to the university's computer help desk, which is based in Columbia. The information had been compiled for a report, but the data had not been removed from the computer system. In January, a hacker obtained the Social Security numbers of 1,220 university researchers, as well as personal passwords of as many as 2,500 people who used an online grant application system.

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Cryptography at its best...

It's always only a matter of time. A little less than a year after the first quantum cryptographic network was demoed, a group of researchers at MIT have announced a working implementation of a hack that's been around in theory since 1998 but never implemented. Skirting around ol' Wernie Heisenberg and that Principle of his, the team exploited quantum entanglement to read the encryption keys encoded in photon polarizations from their momentums, avoiding detection by either end -- in other words, doing what was once thought impossible by cryptographers. The system isn't perfect, however -- in this early incarnation it can only nab 40% of transmitted data before giving itself away, and more importantly, it requires the invention of a "quantum non-demolition box" before the attacker can be anywhere but the same room as the receiver, since right now both attacker and receiver need to be using the same photon detector. Sounds like that might put a damper on that whole "undetectable" thing. Still, the researchers sound upbeat -- they're saying the work proves that no secret is truly safe. We're just wondering if they're pushing MIT to rename their department SETEC ASTRONOMY