Latest crime publications

Criminals can extract a smartphone PIN  directly from the screen using the heat signature left by a user’s fingers, warns new research. A team of computer scientists from the University of Stuttgart and Ludwig Maximillian University has shown that thermal imaging techniques can reveal which parts of the screen were tapped or swiped, even if… Read More

A notorious spamming organisation responsible for the sending of up to a billion unwanted messages a day has inadvertently revealed its entire operation by failing to secure a network-available backup of its operations. A cooperative effort between Mackeeper’s Security Research Centre, CSOonline and Spamhaus took place last month when Chris Vickery, one of Mackeeper’s operatives,… Read More

Lloyds Bank, the largest retail banking outlet in the UK, was subject to an unusually sustained Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS*) attack earlier this month, according to recent reports. Initially reported (paywalled) by the Financial Times, the attack began on the morning of January 11th and ran until the close of Friday 13th. Business Insider,… Read More

A study from Shanghai Jiao Tong University found that a machine could be trained to identify criminals based on their facial features, raising ethical concerns regarding uses of AI. The researchers used 1856 photographs of real people, half of whom were criminals. They found that via supervised machine learning, the system was able to correctly… Read More

Google has released the fruits of new research into upscaling low-resolution images using machine learning to ‘fill in’ the missing details. Compared to the hoary standards Photoshop users have been used to for over twenty years, the results are quite impressive. But in a climate where the camera lies a lot more than it used… Read More