A new Google technical report, Trends in Circumventing Web-Malware Detection documents that it has become difficult to identify malicious Web sites as antivirus software is becoming less effective against them. The researchers analyzed four years' worth of data from 160 million Web pages using its Safe Browsing service, which warns users when they attempt to visit a site thought to have malware. Attackers have developed evasion techniques to avoid having their sites flagged as malicious. ACM TechNews notes that

"One of the ways hackers get around virtual machine-based detection is to require the victim to perform a mouse click, which triggers the site to automatically execute an attack. Browser emulators can malfunction when the malicious code is scrambled. A new, more complex JavaScript code is designed to stop emulated browsers and make manual analysis of the code more difficult, according to the Google engineers. Google also has come across IP cloaking, where a malicious Web site will refuse to serve harmful content to specific IP ranges, especially those used by security researchers. In August 2009, Google found that about 200,000 sites were using IP cloaking."

See also an article on NetworkWorld.

A new Google technical report, Trends in Circumventing Web-Malware Detection documents that it has become difficult to identify malicious Web sites as antivirus software is becoming less effective against them. The researchers analyzed four years' worth of data from 160 million Web pages using its Safe Browsing service, which warns users when they attempt to visit a site thought to have malware. Attackers have developed evasion techniques to avoid having their sites flagged as malicious. ACM TechNews notes that

"One of the ways hackers get around virtual machine-based detection is to require the victim to perform a mouse click, which triggers the site to automatically execute an attack. Browser emulators can malfunction when the malicious code is scrambled. A new, more complex JavaScript code is designed to stop emulated browsers and make manual analysis of the code more difficult, according to the Google engineers. Google also has come across IP cloaking, where a malicious Web site will refuse to serve harmful content to specific IP ranges, especially those used by security researchers. In August 2009, Google found that about 200,000 sites were using IP cloaking."

See also an article on NetworkWorld.

Opportunities in Computational Materials Science

Juana Moreno and Randall Hall

Center for Computation and Technology
Louisiana State University

1:00pm Friday 9 September 2011, ITE 227

The White House Materials Genome Initiative intends to double the speed with which we discover, develop, and manufacture new materials. In order for this initiative to be successful an unprecedented collaboration between computer scientists, applied mathematicians, computational scientists, and engineers with expertise in each of the aspects of the simulation-guided design of modern materials must be established. We must also take advantage of the enormous national investments in the next generation of hyperparallel, heterogeneous, multicore supercomputers to develop experimentally verified algorithms. In this talk I will describe new collaborative efforts in Louisiana towards developing a State-wise team of scientist to attack the challenges in the design of new materials, and the current opportunities at the undergraduate and graduate level.

Dr. Juana Moreno is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at LSU. She received her Ph.D. in condensed matter physics from Rutgers University and was faculty at the University of North Dakota before joining CCT. Her research focuses on modeling, using a variety of computational tools, the transport and magnetic properties of correlated electron systems, including diluted magnetic semiconductors, heavy fermion compounds and low-dimensional systems.

Dr. Randall Hall received his B.S. in Chemistry from UC Berkeley and his PhD in Chemistry with Bruce Berne from Columbia University. He was a postdoctoral associate with Peter Wolynes at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He joined the faculty at LSU in 1986. He is currently the Webster Parish Chapter Alumni Professor at LSU. He is a co-PI of the Louisiana Alliance for Simulation-Guided Materials Appliations (LA-SiGMA).

Host: Yelena Yesha