CSEE Alumna Jeehye Yun (BS CS, 1997) has been selected by the UMBC Alumni Association as the 2013 Outstanding Alumnus from Engineering and Information Technology. The 2013 awards will be presented on Thursday, October 10 at an awards ceremony in the Albin O. Kuhn Library on the UMBC campus.

Jeehye Yun is the founder and CEO of Secured Sciences Group (SSG) where she is responsible for the strategy and operations. SSG is located in UMBC’s Research and Technology Park and specializes in compliance streamlining with service focus areas in Independent Verification and Validation, Cybersecurity and software engineering. Ms. Yun took the company from a single commercial service contract to four million per year in revenue from 2004 to 2009.

Before founding the company, she served as Director of Computing Facilities at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) where she managed the teams supporting infrastructure of research labs, including the Institute’s Global Land Cover Facility, High Performance Computing Lab, Clustered Computing resources, Visualization and experimental networking labs. Ms. Yun also managed staff supporting UMIACS technical and business computing.

CSEE faculty and staff will also remember Jeehye from her work with DoIT, where she worked as a systems programmer and administrator as an undergraduate. She also developed and taught a course on Information Security for the department as a part-time instructor after finishing her undergraduate degree.

If you think you are flumoxed about the crazy politics in Washington… imagine what folks abroad think.

Understandably they are perplexed and a little peeved by the boneheaded standoff. Particularly as the the fiscal nonsense stateside could have adverse economic repurcussions for them… and they have little say in the matter ( a little like taxation without representation).

The Economist of London has some sober but firm advice for our leaders:

It is time for less cliff-hanging, and more common sense.

What advise do you have for our nation’s leaders?

The Dread Pirate is dreaded no more. 

On October 2nd at 3:15pm PT, Ross William Ulbricht, believed to be the Internet’s most infamous drug lord “Dread Pirate Roberts” was arrested in a San Francisco public library. Ulbricht’s notorious website “Silk Road” also met its demise.

“Silk Road”, the Internet’s black market for anonymously purchasing drugs, weapons, contract killings, (and just about any other illegal substance or service you can think of) has probably been the worst kept secret on the internet since Adrian Chen first wrote about it on Kotaku.  

Which makes you wonder why, two and a half years later, after over 1.2 billion dollars in transactions, the FBI finally got around to shutting the site down.

“Silk Road” was run off of a server system operated by “Roberts” running a variation of the Tor obfuscation programs popular on the Deepnet that are designed to mask a users identity. Not quite sure it did the job though.

Forbes magazine has been following “Silk Road” and “Dread Pirate Roberts” for quite some time, and didn’t quite make a clean getaway either when they experimented to see how anonymous the “Silk Road”  system really was by buying a gram of marijuana with Bitcoin.  

Check out the  Forbes interview with “Dread Pirate Roberts” here. 

Kaprica’s malware-scanning charger does its job without actually residing on your phone.

At the annual Black Hat security conference this summer, researchers demonstrated how it would be possible to add malware to an iPhone by connecting it to a modified charger. Now a mobile security startup is attempting to do the opposite, by selling a charger that can scan your smartphone for malware—and repair it, if necessary—while powering it up.

Scanning a smartphone for malware with a charger offers more protection than security apps ever can.

At the annual Black Hat security conference this summer, researchers demonstrated how it would be possible to add malware to an iPhone by connecting it to a modified charger. Now a mobile security startup is attempting to do the opposite, by selling a charger that can scan your smartphone for malware—and repair it, if necessary—while powering it up.