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Scientist Develop Anti-Faking PC
Scientists have developed a computer system with sophisticated pattern recognition abilities that performed more impressively than humans in differentiating between people experiencing genuine pain and people who were just pretending.
In a study published in the journal Current Biology, human subjects did no better than chance – about 50 percent – in correctly judging if a person was feigning pain after seeing videos in which some people were and some were not.
The computer was right 85 percent of the time. Why? The researchers say its pattern-recognition abilities successfully spotted distinctive aspects of facial expressions, particularly involving mouth movements, that people generally missed.
“We all know that computers are good at logic processes and they’ve long out-performed humans on things like playing chess,” said Marian Bartlett of the Institute for Neural Computation at the University of California-San Diego, one of the researchers.
“But in perceptual processes, computers lag far behind humans and have a lot of trouble with perceptual processes that humans tend to find easy, including speech recognition and visual recognition. Here’s an example of a perceptual process that the computer is able to do better than human observers,” Bartlett said in a telephone interview.
For the experiment, 25 volunteers each recorded two videos.
In the first, each of the volunteers immersed an arm in lukewarm water for a minute and were told to try to fool an expert into thinking they were in pain. In the second, the volunteers immersed an arm in a bucket of frigid ice water for a minute, a genuinely painful experience, and were given no instructions on what to do with their facial expressions.
The researchers asked 170 other volunteers to assess which people were in real discomfort and which were faking it.
After they registered a 50 percent accuracy rate, which is no better than a coin flip, the researchers gave the volunteers training in recognizing when someone was faking pain. Even after this, the volunteers managed an accuracy rate of only 55 percent.
The computer’s vision system included a video camera that took images of a person’s facial expressions and decoded them. The computer had been programmed to recognize that one kind of facial movement combinations suggested true pain and another kind suggested faked pain.
Spam Is At A Two-Year High
Spam – particularly the kind with malicious attachments – is enjoying a growth spurt, reaching a two-year high overall, which includes the spike last fall just before the SpamIt operation folded its doors, a security firm says.
In fact spam traffic is about double what it was then, according to M86 Security Labs, which analyzes spam levels across selected domains.
“After multiple recent botnet takedowns, cybercriminal groups remain resilient clearly looking to build their botnets and distribute more fake AV in the process,” the company says in its blog. “It seems spammers have returned from a holiday break and are enthusiastically back to work.”
This report coincides with a report yesterday from Internet security company Commtouch, which says a spike in email-attached malware has just ended, but that further waves are expected.
M86 says in its blog that most of the spam is generated by the Cutwail botnet, and malicious spam accounted for 13% of the mix over the past week, which is unusually high, but even that spiked to 24% yesterday.
Get Ready For Email-Malware Spree
A sizeable uptick in malicious email attachments is just subsiding, but if history is any indicator,several smaller spikes are about to follow that use even more deceptive tactics than their predecessors.
The recent surge, fueled in large part by a flood of fake messages from UPS, is similar to one observed at the end of March in that the messages urge recipients to open an attachment that releases the malware on victims’ machines, according to Internet security firm Commtouch.
The earlier wave used a wide range of package-delivery services as senders, including FedEx and DHL, but the latest outbreak employs a wider variety of messages such as, “Dear client, recipient’s address is wrong”, “Dear User, Delivery Confirmation: FAILED”, and “Dear Client, We are not able to delivery [sic] the postal package”, according to the Commtouch blog.
All the messages then instruct the recipient to open the attachment that contains the malware, claiming it is an invoice or a form that needs to be filled out. “This time we see differences in the style of the emails – there is far more variation in the automatically-generated subjects, body and attachment names. Last time all the attachments were “UPS.exe” – this time there are many variations,” says Avi Turiel, director of product marketing at Commtouch in an email.
The attackers will evaluate the success of the attack by finding out how many recipients activated the malware, “Based on the infections vs. malware sent out they will probably try and figure out what they could improve in the next attack,” he says.