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| Home Front: Tech |
| In WoT, New Search Engine Seeks Hidden Vulnerabilities |
| 2005-06-18 |
| Severely EFL. All you technical types go read the article ;-) As part of an effort to anticipate -- and thwart -- the plans of potential terrorists, the Federal Aviation Administration is supporting the development of a new search engine by University at Buffalo researchers that is designed to detect "hidden" information that can be gleaned from public Web sites. The UB team recently completed an initial prototype system, designed explicitly to enable searches for "hidden" information within the 9/11 Commission Report. The system permits users to find the best trail of evidence through many documents that connects two or more apparently unrelated concepts. Funded by the FAA, as well as by the National Science Foundation specifically for anti-terrorism applications, the UB project is based on Unintended Information Revelation, or UIR, a search technique designed to uncover hidden information. The premise of UIR is that pieces of information that by themselves appear to be innocent may be linked together to reveal inadvertently highly sensitive data. A more robust prototype is expected to be delivered to FAA for evaluation by the end of the year. |
| Posted by:trailing wife |
| #5 Thanks for the technical analysis, guys. In my ignorance I thought this sounded exciting. ;-) |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2005-06-18 11:31 |
| #4 Get better results with the new and improved Whizinator. |
| Posted by: Captain America 2005-06-18 02:20 |
| #3 Yasss. I believe this new tool will be known as the "Rantburg Search Engine," a division of Pruitt Industries. |
| Posted by: Seafarious 2005-06-18 02:18 |
| #2 Shhhh! Don't use the "P" word or the "r-e-p-o-r-t-e-r" will catch on. |
| Posted by: .com 2005-06-18 01:08 |
| #1 This is Data Mining on the internet. Data Mining is widely used in business. In a nutshell DM helps you find patterns of interest in people of interest and then identify more people who fit the patterns you have found. In business this would be to sell them a car loan or whatever. In the WOT this would be to find potential terrorists. For example, you could search for patterns about the 9/11 hijackers and then search for others who fit the patterns in order to find people planning similar attacks. My description makes it sound more precise than it is. Its like a high tech form of profiling that increases the odds of success. Otherwise the article overdoes the GeeWhiz hightech magic bit. The technique has been around for years on large databses, although I don't underestimate the difficulties of doing it over the internet. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2005-06-18 01:06 |