Prof. Stuart Madnick shares tips with NBC reporter Mike Manzoni about how to shop safely online this holiday season and protect your personal information. “If you get a notice from Best Buy that they are having a sale, that is relatively benign. If they ask you to fill in credit card information, then you want to be real cautious,” says Madnick.
Boston Globe reporter Pranshu Verma spotlights BitSight, a cybersecurity ratings company founded by MIT graduates. “The company’s platform uses algorithms to assess a company’s chances of being breached,” writes Verma. “It also provides customers with cybersecurity ratings, risk metrics, and security benchmarks to better assess and combat cyber threats.”
New York Times reporter Steve Lohr spotlights Inrupt, an MIT startup founded by Prof. Tim Berners-Lee, which is aimed at providing people more control over their personal data. “Tim has become increasingly concerned as power in the digital world is weighted against the individual,” explains Daniel Weitzner, a principal research scientist at CSAIL.
MIT researchers have developed a new model that helps quantify a company’s security risk, and estimates possible financial losses, reports Catherine Stupp for The Wall Street Journal. The tool “collects encrypted data from companies about recent incidents and analyzes the anonymized information to determine the probability of different kinds of attacks more broadly,” writes Stupp.
Washington Post reporter Martin Weil spotlights the work of Prof. Fernando Corbató, who “drastically expanded the usefulness of the computer and put its benefits at the reach of all.” Weil notes that Corbató, who died on July 12, “fostered the digital revolution by developing shared computer operating systems and also put his stamp on daily life by introducing the computer password.”
Prof. Emeritus Fernando Corbató, a computer pioneer known for his work with time-sharing computing systems and for inventing the computer password, has died at 93, reports the BBC. “Our world would be very different without his research and that of his descendants,” said Prof. Fadel Adib. “He inspires in his work and his legacy."
New York Times reporter Katie Hafner memorializes the life and work of Professor Emeritus Fernando Corbató, known for his work on computer time-sharing systems. Hafner notes that Corbató’s work on “computer time-sharing in the 1960s helped pave the way for the personal computer, as well as the computer password.”
Alumnus Tom Leighton, CEO and co-founder of Akamai, speaks with Forbes contributor Peter High about the company’s founding and his push towards making the company more focused on cybersecurity.
Fast Company reporter Katherine Schwab spotlights Duality, an MIT startup that is using homomorphic encryption to analyze encrypted data without decrypting it. Schwab explains that the “company’s technology could provide an actual solution to the data privacy problem by allowing companies to keep their data fully encrypted and still find patterns in it.”
Forbes contributor Gil Press writes about MIT cybersecurity startup Duality Technologies, which is working on guaranteeing privacy and utility. Press explains that the company is using a cybersecurity technique called Homomorphic Encryption, which “allows for processing and analysis of the encrypted data without having the secret key.”
Keri Pearlson, executive director of Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan, speaks with Ally Donnelly of NBC 10 about protecting your online privacy. “Your spouse, your family, your birthday, your hometown, your high school, your college, your degrees,” says Pearlson. “I think we have to assume our information is out there and take other steps to protect ourselves.”
NBC News reporters Courtney McGee and Brenda Breslauer speak with MIT alumna Sherri Davidoff, a “white hat” hacker, who hacks into computer systems to help companies test their security. McGee and Breslauer write that Davidoff, “was one of the first female white-hat hackers in an industry still dominated by men.”
Prof. Aleksander Madry and graduate student Anish Athalye speak with BBC News reporter Linda Geddes about how AI systems can be tricked into seeing or hearing things that aren’t actually there. “People are looking at it as a potential security issue as these systems are increasingly being deployed in the real world,” Athalye explains.
MIT researchers have developed a way to prevent the theft of sensitive data hidden on a computer’s memory, writes TechCrunch’s Zack Whittaker. Storing sensitive data in different memory locations creates “clear boundaries for where sharing should and should not happen, so that programs with sensitive information can keep that data reasonably secure,” explains graduate student Vladimir Kiriansky.
Financial Times reporter Jemima Kelly reports that MIT researchers have developed a low-power chip that is hardwired to perform public-key encryption. Kelly writes that the chip is “potentially a game-changer for simple, low-powered products such as smart sensors used by industry to gauge things such as temperature and pressure, as well as health monitors.”