North Carolina state researchers have modified existing speech authentication computer models and have streamlined the process so that it operates more efficiently. Read the full article. [ScienceDaily]

Howard Schmidt, the new cybersecurity czar for the Obama administration, has a short answer for the drumbeat of rhetoric claiming the United States is caught up in a cyberwar that it is losing.

“There is no cyberwar,” Schmidt said. “I think that is a terrible metaphor and I think that is a terrible concept,” Schmidt said. “There are no winners in that environment.” Read the full article. [Wired]

Congress and other government agencies are under a cyber attack an average of 1.8 billion times a month, a number that has been growing exponentially since President Barack Obama took office. In 2008, security events caused by vectors including worms, Trojan horses and spybots averaged 8 million hits per month. That number skyrocketed to 1.6 billion in 2009 and climbed to 1.8 billion this year, according to Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Terrance Gainer. Read the full article. [Politico]

Microsoft's idea that the fight against malware could be funded by an Internet tax is "horrible," an analyst said as other experts weighed in on a recent comment by the company's security chief. Read the full article. [Computerworld]

More details follow the news of the Spanish botnet Mariposa and its owners being caught. The Mariposa Working Group infiltrated the command-and-control structure of Mariposa to monitor the communication channels that relayed information from compromised systems back to the hackers who run the botnet. Read the full article. [The Register]

Forget iris and fingerprint scans — scanning noses could be a quicker and easier way to verify a person’s identity, according to scientists at the University of Bath. With worries about illegal immigration and identity theft, authorities are increasingly looking to using an individual’s physical characteristics, known as biometrics, to confirm their identity. Read the full article. [Homeland Security Newswire]

The nation's new cybersecurity czar in a Town Hall meeting session here today mapped out his top priorities in the post and provided a glimpse at how the Obama administration may handle security issues with other countries. National cybersecurity coordinator Howard Schmidt also announced that the White House was releasing an unclassified version of its plan for securing government and private industry networks. Read the full article. [Dark Reading]

The personal health and financial information stored in thousands of North American home computers may be vulnerable to theft through file-sharing software, according to a research study published online in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. Read the full article. [ScienceDaily]

A German research team has now developed a true random number generator that uses an extra layer of randomness by making a computer memory element, a flip-flop, twitch randomly between its two states 1 or 0. Immediately prior to the switch, the flip-flop is in a "metastable state" where its behavior cannot be predicted. Read the full article. [ScienceDaily]

When security professionals flock to San Francisco for next week's RSA 2010 security conference, they will have access to a set of presentations and events not found on the official RSA agenda. It's billed as an anti-conference of sorts; a place where practitioners can go for an alternate, stripped-down view of the industry. Welcome to Security B-Sides. Read the full article. [CSO]