Berkeley researchers may track Twitter hackers

Berkeley researchers may track Twitter hackers

BERKELEY, Calif. – A handful of UC Berkeley researchers are part of a team that won a $10 million grant to try to head of hackers at the social networking pass. The National Science Foundation awarded the grant for a five-year project exploring how to anticipate and prevent attacks on social networking Web sites.

The work is just one example of dozens of projects at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) here. As many as 150 researchers work at ICSI on projects that range from coming up with new algorithms for voice recognition and video search to writing open source code for networking gear.

"More and more we are looking at the deep meaning of words, data and what’s happening in the network," said Roberto Pierraccini, ICSI’s director and a former voice recognition researcher. "Twenty years ago we were happy to ID things, today we are moving to a different level--identifying the meaning of things," Pierraccini said.

In the new security program, researchers will try to anticipate and block possible social networking attacks, some of which are already emerging. For example, some hackers have found a business accumulating and selling large numbers of Twitter followers.

In network security, researchers have evolved from seeking technical to economic solutions.


ICSI director Roberto Pierraccini oversees research identifying "the meaning of things."

TAG:International Computer Science Institute Hidden Markov Models Voice Recognition Social Networks Spam Security ICSI Research Berkeley Twitter Siri Apple