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Fraud is going uninvestigated by police who are hiding behind the veil of the Action Fraud national crime reporting agency.
In his paper published this week in
Policing, Professor Mark Button, director of the Centre for Counter Fraud Studies at the University of Portsmouth argues that, Action Fraud, which has been widely derided, has become a useful veil from which the police can hide their inadequate response.
Figures from Action Fraud, the arm of the police responsible for recording scams and fraud, show that between 2019 and 2020, over 800,000 people reported being a victim of fraud, with £2.3bn finding its way into criminal hands. However, Professor Button calculated just 0.6 per cent of police officers are dedicated to investigating fraud.
The world is one step closer to ultimately secure conference calls, thanks to a collaboration between Quantum Communications Hub researchers and their German colleagues, enabling a quantum-secure conversation to take place between four parties simultaneously.
A joint work from researchers of the IMDEA Software Institute, Microsoft Research and Saarland University about hardware-software contracts for secure speculation has been awarded as Best Paper at the 42nd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
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IMAGE: IT experts at RUB have found several security issues with digital signatures for PDF documents over the past years. view more
Credit: RUB, Kramer
A security issue in the certification signatures of PDF documents has been discovered by researchers at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. This special form of signed PDF files can be used, for instance, to conclude contracts. Unlike a normal PDF signature, the certification signature permits certain changes to be made in the document after it has actually been signed. This is necessary to allow the second contractual party to also sign the document. The team from the Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security in Bochum showed that the second contractual party can also change the contract text unnoticed when they add their digital signature, without this invalidating the certification. The researchers additionally discovered a weakness in Adobe products that enables attackers to implant malicious code into the documents.
Columbia Engineering researchers have developed SeKVM, the first system that guarantees through a mathematical proof the security of virtual machines in the cloud. This is the first time that a real-world multiprocessor software system has been shown to be mathematically correct and secure, said Computer Science Professor Jason Nieh. This means that users data are correctly managed by software running in the cloud and are safe from security bugs and hackers.