We are delighted when they do well and love to hear news of their success’s.

We also like to give practical help if possible and this is one instance where we can do just that.

Biogy Inc were the winners of our West Coast USA regional final in 2010 and they have developed a product called ‘True Identity’ that transforms the concept of secure identification – in fact Dr John Morgan the Deputy Director of TSWG was impressed enough to say “it is the disruptive solution to cyber crime”.

As a result of the recent RSA breach, Biogy is in licensing and strategic partnership discussions with some of the largest security companies in the world.

Click on this link to find out a little more about the product and information about Biogy.

As I have mentioned before, Cyber Security investment is at an all time high at the moment with investors worldwide seeing it as a very positive sector.

If you have been a previous finalists of the GSC and would like us to publicise your call for funds let us know and we will do our utmost to assist.”

**from http://www.omnicompete.com/GSC_updates.html

“RSA had a major breach this week. Attackers stole information for 40 million two-factor authentication accounts.

That’s a huge breach. And the ones affected most may be IT administrators, who in turn, run the security for countless enterprise and cloud-based services in the public and private sector. The ramifications are considerable. This attack means that hundreds if not millions of people could be affected if IT administrator accounts now get hacked.”

More: RSA Breach: An Attack That Used a Social Media Booby Trap?

Global Security Challenge Finalists Announced

Dr. Michael Fiske, Biogy’s CEO said “this is a substantial validation of our technology, and the contest forum was an excellent venue to bring our technology into the public eye.” The Biogy technology is a significant breakthrough in the war on cyber crime, and is a pivotal technology required to effectively fight cybercrime and identity theft. President Obama has made cyber security a key initiative of his administration, but the consensus is that they have not made very much progress. (http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20101007_5336.php) “Biogy is the key technology the administration needs to make significant progress on this initiative, ” says Dr. Fiske.

Biogy technology is independent of the user’s computer security, and of the networks that make up the Internet. The user’s computer is no longer trustworthy given the rampant presence of viruses, worms and botnets. “It is naive to secure mobile and online banking transactions based on the current untrusted security components,” commented Dr. Fiske.

Then there are the human factors. Biogy’s approach prevents phishing attacks in which users are tricked into giving passwords and other authentication factors via false emails and telephone calls from purported banking institutions. Fiske says, “to secure transactions, you cannot have a security system that is susceptible to human behavior or error.” Biogy eliminates this through use of strong identity technology that uses local fingerprint authentication, followed by a new password, which the user neither remembers nor is unaware of, every time the service is used.”

Biogy technology is available for licensing to partners and manufacturers that are affected by cybercrime and identity theft. Dr. Fiske presented the first available design, a biometric protected USB with AES-256 encrypted storage and authentication token, called the Personal Vault. Dr. Fiske added “with the Personal Vault, financial institutions, governments, and health care organizations can eliminate cyberattacks that are costing these institutions billions annually.”

About Biogy Inc: Biogy is an identity management company based in San Francisco. Biogy was founded in 2007 with the mission to make a dramatic breakthrough in cybersecurity and identity technology to reduce or eliminate cybercrime and identity theft. Biogy licenses its technology to manufacturers, security solutions providers and others.

Press Contact Kathleen Lyman 415.203.5888 klyman (at) biogy.com

I did my undergraduate computer science degree in the early 1970s and even then we were taught that passwords should always be hashed (we called them one-way-ciphers back then). Instead of comparing the actual password to whatever was typed, the typed password was hashed and compared to the stored hashed password. In this way, even if the password file was compromised, it was impossible to recover the passwords.

As computers got faster, two changes got made most publicly in the Unix operating system. Firstly, the encryption algorithm needed to become computationally expensive, unlike most encryption where efficiency is one of the goals. Secondly, a salt was stored along with the password. These two changes made it intractable, at least for a time, to pre-compute hashed values for an entire dictionary or for all possible passwords.

The best solution to this is to perform all the authentication on the drive itself, as Biogy does on its personal data vault. But even if authentication is done on the host, there is a requirement for a protocol to unlock the drive that is not vulnerable to a simple replay.