Latest Homeland security and Police News

Essex homes forensically marked with SelectaDNA to protect against burglary
posted on 08/06/2009

Ov 5,000 homes in the Basildon and Thurrock district of Essex are being forensically marked with SelectaDNA to protect against burglary. Essex Police, the Home Office and the Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership have joined forces to address the small but significant problem of burglary in areas within Basildon and Thurrock. The partnerships will be running a pilot scheme in designated streets that will involve using DNA coding on valuable property. Fully trained officers will visit homes and show residents how to use SelectaDNA, a clear liquid solution which can can be applied to valuable items of property such as flatscreen TVs, MP3 players, laptops, iPods, and jewellery. SelectaDNA is a new forensic technology which links criminals to crime scenes and provides an unbreakable chain of evidence in a court of law. The liquid is specifically DNA-coded to each residential address and also contains thousands of unique microdots, allowing the Police two ways to identify marked it... [more]

Price and legislation continue to be hurdles that limit the use of biometrics
posted on 04/06/2009

With government agencies continuing to benefit from the use of fingerprint devices, other industries have started to follow suit as the interest surrounding biometrics grows. Fingerprint solutions are now becoming more commonplace within airports and for border control applications. Within healthcare they have found a niche in the protection of patient records while in more industrial areas, such as manufacturing, there is an increasing requirement for fingerprint biometrics in time and attendance applications. Despite the hype for biometrics in past years, the uptake of these devices has remained slow. Price, user acceptance and legislation continue to be hurdles that limited the use of biometrics. However, recently a few devices have overcome these barriers and have found industry niches. In its latest biometrics market report, IMS Research forecasts the global market for fingerprint devices to reach $650 million by 2013. Report author and analyst at IMS Research Justin Siller ... [more]

Tracker recovers stolen car in 60 minutes
posted on 04/06/2009

A 80 year old North Yorkshire farmer parked his car while he was on a Sunday morning walk in a remote country lane, near his North Yorkshire farm. He left the keys in the centre console of the vehicle as he did not want to drop them while walking. A short time later, the farmer saw his BMW being driven off with another vehicle following behind. It only takes a second for thieves to seize an opportunity to steal a car. Luckily his BMW X5 was fitted with a device from Tracker. Although the car was gone in 60 seconds, Tracker had it back in 60 minutes. “Worryingly, around 74% of all vehicles Tracker recovered in 2008 were stolen using driver’s keys,” explains Stuart Chapman, Tracker’s Police Relationships Manager and a former senior Police Officer. “This story illustrates how dangerous it is to leave keys in the car, even in an isolated place where you think no one is around.” Tracker activated the device at 11:11 am and the signal was picked up almost immediately via one of its anten... [more]

Easier detection of TATP explosive
posted on 03/06/2009

The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology is Israel's leading science and technology university. Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have discovered six new polymorphic crystalline structures of triacetone-triperoxide (TATP), the easy to make but difficult to detect explosive, thought to be used in the July 2005 London bombings and increasingly used by terrorists worldwide. TATP is popular among terrorist organisations around the world for two reasons - it is easy to prepare and very difficult to detect. The findings will make it easier to detect TATP, even when it is concealed. TATP was previously believed to have just one crystalline form. However, using methods that include X-ray crystallography (which reveals the arrangement of atoms within a crystal), Professor Ehud Keinan of the Technion Faculty of Chemistry and colleagues have found the explosive can form at least six different types of crystals, depending on the conditions during its synthesis and c... [more]

Romanian hacker started phishing campaign when he was 14 years old
posted on 02/06/2009

The US District Court in Minneapolis has sentenced a 23-year-old Romanian immigrant to 8.5 years in jail for stealing a total of approximately $700,000 from over 7,000 innocent people. Sergiu Daniel Popa spammed out emails pretending to come from financial institutions such as SunTrust, Citibank and PayPal, trying to lure victims into visiting bogus webpages. From these phishing websites, Popa stole PIN codes, names and addresses, bank account numbers, credit card and social security information. Popa also offered offered phishing kits for sale for $1500, complete with instructions on how to send spam and counterfeit credit cards. According to local media reports, Popa started his phishing campaign - which lasted almost seven years - in June 2000, making him 14 years old. In the old days (back in the late 1980s and 1990s), it wasn't unusual for virus writers to be in their teens but this is a much more serious offence than the attention-seeking kind of malware writing we saw in ... [more]

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