Spafford comments on AT&T iPad hacking

“Having email addresses by itself is not much of a threat: people give them out all the time, and spammers can and do guess them easily,” said Eugene Spafford, executive director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security at Purdue University.

“It is more an issue if you can pair addresses with places of employment, such as government agencies,” he added. “Then it becomes possible to collect further information, and perhaps get a toehold into Google, Bing or other information sources.”

2 Winona State Students Are Suspected of Involvement in Large-Scale Cybercrimes

U.S. Government, Businesses Are Poorly Prepared for Cyber Attacks, Experts Say at AAAS

Spafford said academic specialists have been warning for more than 25 years about vulnerabilities in computer systems that can lead to identify theft, credit card fraud and other security intrusions.

Battling Cyber Threats

Computer security experts say the United States faces a radical shortage of highly skilled cybersecurity professionals who can prevent and combat cyber attacks. One federal official has estimated that there are only 1000 cybersecurity experts in the United States who have the deep technical knowledge required to safeguard national security; tens of thousands are needed, he believes.

Information Assurance Education 2011: A Year of Promise

Professor Spafford discusses the state of information assurance education in a podcast available on GovInfoSecurity.com.

CERIAS PhD Candidate Appointed an Emerging Leader by the American Library Association

Temitope Toriola, a 1st year Information Security PhD candidate at CERIAS, was appointed an Emerging Leader by the American Library Association.

NSF awards Purdue $1.5 million to enhance the anonymization and de-identification of sensitive data

Victor Raskin (Linguistics, CERIAS), Chris Clifton (C.S., CERIAS), Luo Si (C.S., CERIAS) and Karen Chang (School of Nursing) received a $1.5 million award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to enhance the anonymization and de-identification of sensitive data.

Melissa J. Dark Appointed W.C. Furnas Professor in the College of Technology

Digital Forensics Conference Grabs Media Attention in the Middle East

Keynote presenters of this year’s conference are exceptional experts of the field. Paul Kurtz, a world renowned cyber security expert, former Assistant to the President of the United States and Senior Director for Critical Infrastructure Protection in the White House Homeland Security Council, presented on the first day. Dr. Marcus Rogers, research scholar, professor, and a fellow of CERIAS delivered his keynote address on the second day.

Not an Infosec Bit, but some Purdue Bragging